Lawrenceville Plasma Physics : Focus Fusion/Dense Plasma Focus update



Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (LPP’s) design team has now completed the six-month design phase of the project, finishing design work on the device, the shielding wall and the vacuum chamber. We are now into the fabrication and construction phase, which will last three months.

LPP has submitted a concept paper to the new Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. ARPA-E is a new agency, molded on DARPA, which is soliciting proposals for “transformational” energy technology. Based on the 8-page concepts papers, ARPA-E will ask selected proposers to submit a full 50-page application. We will know if we are selected for that step by late June.

A dense plasma focus (DPF) is a plasma machine that produces, by electromagnetic acceleration and compression, short-lived plasma that is so hot and dense that it becomes a copious multi-radiation source. It was invented in the early 1960s by J.W. Mather and also independently by N.V. Filippov. The electromagnetic compression of a plasma is called a “pinch”. The plasma focus is similar to the high-intensity plasma gun device (HIPGD) (or just plasma gun), which ejects plasma in the form of a plasmoid, without pinching it.