> Abstract:Building on recent ignition-access work of Delgado-Aparicio, Ono, and Menard, we show that even a single-use, gram-scale quantity of spin-polarized fuel (SPF) is useful for increasing fusion power and gain in magnetic confinement fusion machines such as tokamaks and stellarators. While fueling a fusion power plant continuously with SPF requires \\sim∼kilograms per day, far beyond present capabilities, a single-use short pulse of SPF allows a fusion plasma to cross into a high-gain regime, and stay there, even after switching back to regular unpolarized fuel. With continuous polarized fueling, polarization also makes high-gain plasmas easier to control: a resonant wave that depolarizes the fuel lowers the reactivity quickly, on a much faster timescale than transport. Grams of polarized fuel can therefore improve plasma performance and open a path to scaling SPF sources and usage, from small first experiments to continuous fueling.
| | | | --- | --- | | Comments: | 10 pages, 6 figures | | Subjects: | Plasma Physics (physics.plasm-ph) | | Cite as: | arXiv:2610.11080 \[physics.plasm-ph\] | | | (or arXiv:2610.11080v1 \[physics.plasm-ph\] for this version) | | | https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.11080 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) |
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