Pinch

A family of approaches that confine a plasma using the magnetic field generated by a current flowing through the plasma itself, which squeezes, or pinches, the plasma column inward. A Z-pinch drives the current along the length of a straight column and needs no external confining coils. A reversed-field pinch is a ring-shaped variant with a weaker external field whose direction reverses near the plasma edge. A pinched column tends to kink sideways or neck into sausage-like segments, and each variant suppresses these instabilities differently: Zap Energy, for example, runs a flow of plasma along the column at different speeds at different radii. Pinch plasmas typically last microseconds.

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concept:pinch

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