Experimets on pulse elongation of high-power microsecond e-beam for plasma heating in multi mirror trap GOL-3

Abstract

Essential progress was achieved in experiments on heating the dense plasma in the multimirror trap GOL-3 by high-power relativistic electron beam in last few years. The beam parameters at the experiments were the following: electron energy ~1 MeV, beam current ~25 kA, beam current density in plasma ~2 kA/cm2, pulse duration 9 mus, total energy of the beam pulse ~150 kJ. Due to the high level of the current density and effect of a novel mechanism of ion heating the temperature of ions reached 2-3 keV at the electron temperature about 3 keV for the plasma density ~1015 cm-3. Energy confinement time of the plasma in these experiments has reached the level of 1 ms. The mechanism of fast ion heating is based on the collective ion acceleration along the magnetic field lines produced by high-gradients of the electron pressure in the plasma due to enhanced heating in the mirrors. The basic condition for such mechanism realization is anomalously low electron thermal conductivity along the trap axis which is provided by small scale Langmuir turbulence developing as result of two-stream instability. In order to analyze fusion prospects of such way of plasma heating in the long solenoid trap it is necessary to investigate experimentally the possibility of further increase of plasma parameters by the elongation of the beam pulse. As the first step on solving this task we have performed the experiments at the accelerator U-2 on 1.5 fold increase of the e-beam duration. Results of these experiments are presented in this paper. Conditions for durable generation in magnetically insulated diode, stable transportation and compression in the magnetic field of intense REB found in the experiments, permit us to increase the beam pulse duration from 9 mus to 14 mus with somewhat less energy of the electrons but with the same level of the energy content in the pulse. In the paper we describe the experiments on the diode voltage shaping for better matching of pulse generator with the accelerator diode as well as the results of measurements of the beam cross section by means of X-ray obscure and sectional calorimeter. Also we discuss the directions of future investigations aimed to the increase of the beam parameters in order to obtain (5-10) keV temperature of the plasma confined in multimirror trap.