David Kirtley

And it traps itself.

And the craziest part of this, in my mind, is that we actually see this in nature all the time.

If you look at the sun, we see solar flares.

And in a solar flare, we've all seen the pictures of the photosphere of the sun and this large arc of plasma coming out.

That plasma has current, electrical current flowing in it.

And then we see this solar flare rip off of the sun.

Mm-hmm.

And that solar flare then can flow throughout and continue into the solar system.

And for a little while anyway, it makes something called a plasmoid.

That plasmoid is in fact electrical current flowing in the plasma, generating a magnetic field and holding it for longer than it would otherwise.

And so we've observed these for a hundred years and we've known about these plasmoids for a long time.

And there's researchers that have tried intentionally to make them.

But fundamentally, that's what we do every day is make one of these self-organized closed field plasmas.

And there's the hard part because I just described a solar flare.

And yes, we've seen the pictures of them, but we've also watched them and they appear, they fly away from the sun and then they go away.

And that's not what we want in fusion, right?

We want to be able to control this.

And so that's the hard part of the job.

Um, and so that's what we've spent the last number of years learning how to do ourselves and others on these post closed field FRC systems.

Let's first talk about how to make them.