Magnetization of high-density plasma with a jet velocity of hundreds of km/s
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Updated: Aug 16, 2025

A 100 KW Class Applied-field Magnetoplasmadynamic Thruster
Published on: December 22, 2018
Tie-Huai Zhang1,2, Wei-Min Wang3,4, Yu-Tong Li1,2,4,5
1Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, CAS, Beijing 100190, China.
Abstract:
High magnetic fields at the kilotesla scale have been experimentally generated and finding methods to fully embed such fields into high-density plasma is interesting for magnetically assisted a fast ignition scheme of inertial confinement fusion, laboratory astrophysics, and magnetically guided fast electron beam for broad applications. We investigate diffusion and embedment of an external magnetic field inwards a high-density plasma by analysis and simulation. By introducing the magnetic Péclet number, dimensional analysis indicates that the magnetizing process is sensitive to the jet velocity, temperature, and size of the plasma and gives a phenomenological scaling law of the magnetic field embedment time with an arbitrary jet velocity. The analytical results are verified by magnetic field simulation and applied in 100-g/cm^{3}, 100-μm-radius plasmas with a jet velocity of 0-400 km/s and a temperature of 50-500 eV, typically adopted in experiments. Attributed to an effective electric field from frame transformation, the magnetic field embedment time can be significantly reduced by one order of magnitude when a jetting plasma is adopted with a velocity of hundreds of kilometers per second, e.g., from 5.5 ns in a static plasma to a 0.5 ns timescale in a jetting plasma of 200 km/s. The promoted embedment process favors for various applications mentioned above.
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