Ion-beam superpinch

Intense nonrelativistic light-ion beams generated in magnetically insulated diodes can reach total beam currents large enough to confine charged fusion products within pinch channels which are formed by these beams if they are projected onto thermonuclear material. Furthermore, since the required beam currents are still below the critical Alfv\'en current, these pinch channels are magnetohydrodynamically stable. However, because the time these beams last is very short and of the order of 10 nsec, the thermonuclear target must have a density at least as large as solid-state density to satisfy the Lawson criterion. This large target density makes it necessary that the beam be focused down to a radius less than {~} 10^-2 cm, to balance the plasma pressure against the magnetic pressure. To make this focusing possible a new kind of a low-emittance intense ion source is proposed. It consists of pointlike pulsed dense plasma positioned in the field-free space behind a meshlike anode. The focusing itself can be done in three steps, first by sufficiently good ion optics, second by wall focusing, and third by radiation cooling. This inertial-confinement fusion concept avoids the problems of reaching this goal through highdensity target compression by ablative implosion.