Direct Electromagnetic Acceleration of a Compact Toroid to High Density and High Speed

The direct acceleration and compression of a magnetically confined plasma, called a compact toroid (CT), by an electrical discharge are investigated with numerical time-dependent magnetohydrodynamic computer simulations. We find that a critical dimensionless parameter P characterizes the resiliency of a CT to an acceleration over a characteristic distance, and that a CT can be compressed self-similarly and accelerated to an arbitrary nonrelativistic speed when P is maintained in an appropriate range.