| Abstract: | The long standing goal to produce reactor-viable fusion in the laboratory is challenged by the difficulty to confine hot (keV) plasmas that can sustain fusion reactions. One way to obtain the required thermal isolation is through magnetic confinement geometries. This talk will focus on magnetic-mirror machines that need to deal with several plasma instability and escape mechanisms that tend to shorten the plasma lifetime. A dedicated experiment was built to study the interaction of intense RF fields in the MHz range with the plasma, as means to improve its confinement. We achieve plasma heating and rotation due to the RF field, and find suggestive evidence for improved stability |
