Development of a new concept ion source for high performance inertial electrostatic confinement fusion device

An Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion (IECF) is a concept for retaining a plasma using an electrostatic potential well. It consists of two spherical grids inside the vacuum chamber. An insulated high voltage feed-through supplies power to the inner grid cathode, and a small amount of deuterium or tritium gas (0.1-1.0 Pa) is fed into the chamber. When the voltage is applied to the inner grid, the background gas is ionized by ion and electron impact. The generated ions are oscillated by the potential difference between the spherical grids. MeV-order protons and neutrons are produced by the fusion interaction that mainly results from beam-background and fast neutral-background interactions.