Introduction

Book chapter, 2012

The dominant purpose for confining plasma on earth is the achievement of nuclear fusion. The main path to achieve this is by using magnetic fields. Thus a scientific problem of major potential usefulness is the confinement of plasma by magnetic fields [1–26]. The necessity of plasma for fusion on earth is that the thermonuclear way of making nuclei collide by their thermal velocity is the only feasible way and this requires temperatures of above 100 million centigrades. At such temperatures matter is in its fourth state, the plasma state. A plasma can simply be described as an ionized gas where the charge of the particles makes magnetic confinement potentially possible.