Status and program of concept exploration helical mirror device

A critical experiment should exclude all effects except for the helical confinement. It requires identical regimes of the plasma gun, the end-plates biasing and the magnetic field strength in the quasi-steady state. Magnetic fields of the opposite directions will cause different signs of the longitudinal force, thus changing the axial dependencies of the plasma density and velocity. Changes in the longitudinal plasma profile in different regimes will allow finding the scalings of the helical mirrors performance: − varying plasma biasing at fixed solenoidal and helical magnetic fields; − varying the helical component at fixed solenoidal field and biasing; − varying the solenoidal component at fixed helical field and biasing; − other experimental scalings (e.g., field strength, density, sort of gas, etc.).