ABSTRACT
In 1966 D. Koopman and his colleagues at the Maryland Institute of Technology generated a plasma with a pulsed ruby laser and controlled it with a magnetic field. The technique was developed for use in achieving controlled thermonuclear power. There has been much work on the laser approach to thermonuclear fusion since that time. A. M. Weinberg, the Director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has written that "the present energy crisis is neither theoretical nor long range; it is real and it is immediate". The laser has been introduced in an attempt to avoid this difficult confinement problem. A pellet of solid deuterium rather than a gas is used or deuterium plus tritium or lithium deuteride or deuterized polyethylene. J. Thorne suggested that theory indicates that strong magnetic fields can be created in plasmas by circularly polarized laser beams.
