STM-D-0457Paper1976Published and peer-reviewed

Application of the relativistic electron beams originating in the discharges of plasma focus type for the combined laser-REB plasma heating

V. A. Gribkov

Summary and citation · read the original at the source · none found

In one page

In 1976 Vitaliy Gribkov brought a short paper to an international meeting in Turin on how to store energy and then let it go fast. His subject is a by-product most people treated as a nuisance. A plasma focus is a capacitor bank dumped in microseconds into a gas: the current sheet runs down a coaxial gun, sweeps the gas ahead of it, and collapses into a tiny, dense, extremely hot pinch. At the moment of collapse the machine also fires out a beam of electrons travelling near the speed of light, back along the axis. Gribkov’s proposal, stated in his title, is to stop treating that beam as waste and start using it — to heat plasma with the relativistic electron beam and a laser together rather than with either alone. The paper sits with the fast-discharge work in that volume, which is the right home for it: the plasma focus is among the simplest machines ever built for turning slowly stored energy into a brief, self-organising plasma.

Why it matters hereChapter 9 is about self-organising plasma structures, and the plasma focus is the laboratory case where one forms on demand and throws out its own particle beams. Chapter 12 is about driving nuclei together by engineering their environment rather than by brute confinement, and this chapter is an early instance of the same instinct — use the machine’s own self-generated beam as one of the drivers.

What it claims

01A plasma focus discharge originates relativistic electron beams. Gribkov’s title states it as an established fact of the device and builds on it: when the current sheet of a plasma focus collapses onto the axis, the machine emits not only radiation and an ion beam directed away from the anode but an electron beam driven back into it, with electron energies reaching relativistic values. That the beams exist, and that they come out of the collapse itself rather than from any separate accelerator, is the premise the whole chapter rests on.Title, chapter 31, pages 271 to 276
Settled physics
02The proposal is combined heating. Rather than choose between a laser and a particle beam, Gribkov’s title puts the plasma focus’s own relativistic electron beam and a laser onto the same plasma, for what he calls combined laser-REB plasma heating. The interest of that is architectural: the beam is free, in the sense that the discharge makes it anyway, so a machine already built to compress plasma also supplies one of the two heating channels.Title, chapter 31, pages 271 to 276
Designed, not yet built
03The venue places the work correctly. Energy Storage, Compression, and Switching gathers, in the editors’ own scope, slow systems such as mains-frequency machinery, transformers and flywheel-homopolar generators, intermediate systems such as fast capacitor banks and superconducting storage, and fast systems — Marx and Blumlein generators, oil, water and pressurised-water dielectrics, magnetic insulation, electron beams and plasmas. Gribkov’s chapter belongs to the last group, which is where a plasma focus belongs: it is an energy-compression device first and a plasma experiment second.The volume’s published scope, Energy Storage, Compression, and Switching, Plenum Press 1976
Settled physics
04This is the opening of a long programme, not an isolated note. Gribkov went on to spend decades measuring what a dense plasma focus actually emits and what those emissions do — the hot plasma and fast ion streams, their interaction with materials under test, and the pinch dynamics of megajoule-class devices — and that later work is published, refereed and available. The 1976 chapter is where the idea of putting the machine’s own beams to work first appears under his name.Author line; continued in his 2015 Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion paper on dense plasma focus devices
Published and peer-reviewed
05What to watch: whether a plasma focus can be driven to useful net fusion output using its own self-generated beams as part of the drive. The measurements that would settle it are being taken on the modern descendants of Gribkov’s machines — the megajoule PF-1000 class devices, where pinch dynamics and beam production are now diagnosed shot by shot — and in the aneutronic proton-boron work that uses the same geometry. The 1976 chapter itself remains hard to check: the volume has not been digitised, so the argument behind the title has to be read on paper.Title; and the record, which shows one citing work and no digitised copy
What to watch

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-2214-6_31LICENCE CHECKED. Chapter 31, pages 271 to 276, of Energy Storage, Compression, and Switching, edited by W. H. Bostick, V. Nardi and O. S. F. Zucker, Plenum Press, New York, 1976, 537 pages, ISBN 978-0-306-30892-5, from an international conference held in Turin; Springer now holds the digital rights. No Creative Commons statement appears in Crossref, OpenAlex or Unpaywall, all of which mark the record closed. FULL TEXT NOT REACHED. The chapter is not on arXiv, link.springer.com serves a bot challenge to automated readers, Open Library shows the volume has never been digitised and no library scan exists at the Internet Archive, and OpenAlex records exactly one citing work. This sheet was therefore written from the bibliographic record — title, author, volume, editors, publisher, pagination and the four references Semantic Scholar counts — together with the volume’s own published scope, and it says nothing about the chapter’s results, because the results could not be read. Locators below name the title or the record, never a page of argument. A note on the title: several catalogues render REB as Reb; it is the standard abbreviation for relativistic electron beam and is restored here. No text of the paper is reproduced.

How to cite it

V. A. Gribkov (1976) Application of the relativistic electron beams originating in the discharges of plasma focus type for the combined laser-REB plasma heating. doi:10.1007/978-1-4684-2214-6_31

Where it sits in the curriculum

Plasmoids, charge clusters and the orbs Lattice confinement fusion