Abstract
Thrusts imparted by helicon thrusters terminated by a cusp magnetic field and a physical wall are compared in a laboratory experiment, where the configurations have source lengths of 26 cm and 17.5 cm, respectively. The thruster is typically operated at about 5 kW of radiofrequency power and argon gas is used as a propellant. The influence of the cusp magnetic field inside the source on the thrust is clearly observed for the long source length case, while it does not significantly affect the thrust for the short source length case. The results imply that the thrust enhancement by the cusp magnetic field is due to the geometrical isolation of the plasma from the physical wall, which reduces energy loss to the wall. Furthermore, it is observed that the high-potential plasma for the short source length case is indeed unstable due to microarcings, which occur with an interval time of about sub-second. It is shown that the occurrence of microarcings induces a temporal change in the plasma potential, while no drastic change in the electron temperature is observed.
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