Confinement Time and Ambipolar Potential in a Relativistic Mirror-Confined Plasma

Advanced aneutronic fusion fuels such as proton-Boron$^{11}$ tend to require much higher temperatures than conventional fuels like deuterium-tritium. For electrons, the bulk plasma temperature can approach a substantial fraction of the rest mass. In a mirror confinement system, where the electrons are confined by an ambipolar potential of at least five electron temperatures, the tail electrons which can escape the potential are fully relativistic, which must be taken into account in calculating their confinement. In this paper, simple estimates are employed to extend the scaling of the confinement time into the relativistic regime. By asymptotically matching this scaling to known solutions in the non-relativistic limit, accurate forms for the confinement time (and thus the the ambipolar potential) are obtained. These forms are verified using finite-element-based Fokker-Planck simulations over a wide range of parameters. Comparing relativistic and nonrelativistic mirror-confined plasmas with the same ratio of confining potential $|e\phi|$ to electron temperature $T_e$ and the same mirror ratio $R$, the net result is a decrease in the confinement time due to relativistic effects by a factor of $S \equiv (1+15T_e/8m_ec^2)/(1+2|e\phi|/m_ec^2)$.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

Sensitivity of synchrotron radiation to the superthermal electron population in mildly relativistic plasma

Synchrotron radiation has markedly different behavior in $\sim 10~\textrm{keV}$ and in $\sim 100~\textrm{keV}$ plasma. We show that high-energy electrons which occupy the tail of velocity distribution function have disproportionate impact on power loss of $\sim 100~\textrm{keV}$ plasma. If electrons with energy more than a cutoff energy are redistributed while keeping the Maxwellian distribution function below cutoff energy intact, both emission and absorption of synchrotron radiation act to decrease the lost power. These novel radiation transport effects in non-equilibrium plasma suggest large utility in the deconfinement of high-energy electrons to reduce synchrotron radiation in applications where the radiation is deleterious.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Po