David Kirtley

And so I like to think about this as the motor in a Tesla.

In your electric car, you have a motor, electric motor.

And what that motor has is a series of windings.

Those windings, you flow electrical current, in this case from a battery, hit the gas.

Electricity flows from the battery into the motor, into those windings, and it generates an electromagnetic force, a Lorentz force is what it's technically called.

This electromagnetic force flows

induces an electrical current on the armature, on the shaft.

And this is getting into the details, but in the armature of an electrical motor, that actually is what spins.

And so the outside of a motor doesn't spin.

You have flow electrical current through it and the inside does spin.

That electromagnetic force is what is spinning that armature.

In our case, we're inducing an electrical force in that electromagnet, and that's putting electrical current, just like in the armature, into that plasma.

And we can use that force to do interesting things.

So that electromagnetic force can compress the fusion plasma.

It can expand the fusion plasma.

But here's the problem.

It's unstable.

And so this is something you learn very early in your graduate work as a student in fusion, is you learn about plasmas that are called high beta plasmas.

Plasma beta is the ratio of the magnetic pressure to the particle pressure.

And so what that fundamentally means is I talked about how you have a magnetic field.