Generation and control of field-aligned flow velocity shear in a fully ionized collisionless plasma

Abstract

A modified plasma-synthesis method is developed in order to actively control an ion flow energy along magnetic-field lines, where ion and electron emitters of the same diameter are oppositely set at cylindrical machine ends and the ion emitter is concentrically segmented into three sections. The field-aligned ion flows with radially different energies, or ion flow velocity shears, are generated in a radially uniform plasma potential when each section of the segmented ion emitter is individually biased at a positive value above the plasma potential.