David Kirtley

And so they're on a scale that we can see and measure and understand really intuitively.

And in a magnetic system, your goal is to simply trap it.

as many of these particles as you can for long enough and heat them so they're hot enough so that they bang into each other.

They collide enough that you're doing fusion.

And you're doing enough fusion to overcome as fast as you're losing those particles.

And so that's what happens when you put particles in a magnetic field and you try to hold on to it.

The challenge is...

that's really hard to hold onto them long enough.

These particles are moving around, they're moving at very high velocity, millions of miles per hour, they're colliding with each other, and they're getting knocked off and getting knocked away.

So we've talked about inertial fusion, where you try to confine a fusion plasma by crushing it as fast as possible, and magnetic fusion, where you just simply have a magnetic field and your goal is to hold onto it for as long as possible.

But there's another way to do fusion.

And in some ways, it's one of the earliest approaches for fusion that was successful.

As scientists and engineers, maybe we're not too creative with the terminology.

We call the technique that Helion uses magneto-inertial fusion because it does a little bit of both.

So to understand that, we can actually go back in history a little bit and think about the evolution of some of these approaches to fusion.

And so from our perspective, we look at the technology that we use as built on physics experiments that were very successful in the 1950s.

And in those systems, the earliest pioneers of fusion said, I know we understand the physics.

We have to take these gases, heat them to 100 million degrees and then confine them, push them together so that fusion happens.

And so what is the best way to do that?

So some of the earliest programs, we call them the theta pinch.