The IAEA Technical Committee Meeting on Plasma Heating and Confinement in Open Systems was held in Moscow, 24-28 September 1984. 30 physicists from the USSR, USA, Japan, FRG, Italy, Sweden and the People's Republic of China attended the Meeting. A well-arranged programme gave ample opportunity for discussions of the problems under consideration.A rapid progress in the development of ambipolar tandem mirrors has been observed since the previous Meeting (1981, Novosibirsk; see Nucl. Fusion 22 (1982) 433). This progress is not only due to the attractiveness of the idea of reducing the end losses by an ambipolar electric field but, above all, to the fact that this is more and more being confirmed experimentally. At present, the tandem mirrors are the recognized leaders among the open systems, a fact reflected by the presentations at the Meeting, most of which were on tandem mirrors. A wide range of problems was discussed in these contributions: experimental results on heating and confinement obtained at the facilities already being operated, progress with the machines under construction, new ideas on possible modifications of the magnetic configuration in tandem mirrors, and several problems of tandem mirror confinement theory.
Plasma confinement studies in open systems