Performance characteristics of an inertial-electrostatic confinement fusion device with magnetron discharge

A magnetron discharge as a built-in ion source for an inertial-electrostatic confinement fusion (IECF) device was experimentally studied aiming at a drastic improvement of fusion reaction rate. With this discharge in the vicinity of the grounded vacuum chamber, produced ions are expected to have almost full energy corresponding to the voltage applied to the central transparent cathode. Also, the magnetron-glow hybrid discharge is found to be effective to make the operation free from glow discharge restriction among the discharge voltage, current and gas pressure. As a consequence, the neutron yield normalized by the gas pressure shows higher value than the conventional glow-discharge-based IECF, although the gas pressure we achieved is found to remain still the region where the fusion reaction between the ion beam and background gas is dominant.