Beyond the Brillouin Limit with the Penning Fusion Experiment

Several years ago, it was proposed that a dense non-neutral plasma could be produced in a Penning trap. Nonneutral plasmas have excellent confinement, and such a dense plasma might produce simultaneously high density and good confinement. Recently, this theoretical conjecture has been demonstrated in a small (3 mm radius) electron experiment, PFX (Penning Fusion Experiment). Densities up to 35 times the Brillouin density (limiting number density in a static trap) have been inferred from the observed strong (100:1) spherical focusing. Electrons are injected at low energy from a single pole of the sphere. A surprising observation is the self-organization of the system into a spherical state, which occurs precisely when the trap parameters are adjusted to produce a spherical well. This organization is caused by a bootstrapping mechanism which produces a hysteresis. Observations of energy-scattered electrons confirm the existence of a dense spherical focus.