David Kirtley

And then we'll talk about how to make them stable because they're two different things.

And we spent a lot of time on both.

So we talked about timescale.

So you have to reverse the field.

You have to, you have to change the electrical current in a millionth of a second.

And so how do you do that?

So I've described this system as you have a series of magnets.

You have a magnetic field on the outside.

And then on the inside of this, you have this donut, this FRC that has its own electrical current.

And we didn't talk about this yet, but it's generated a magnetic field.

And that magnetic field has pressure.

And this is the other thing that's really interesting.

So we talked about how this theta pinch compresses a magnetic field.

It applies a pressure on the outside.

But the plasma itself has a pressure on the inside.

And it has both a particle pressure, literally the particles bouncing.

Think about hot gas in a balloon.

The particles expanding, the ideal gas law expanding and contracting inside a balloon.

But they also have a magnetic pressure.

They have the electromagnetism is pushing back.