GENERATION AND MAINTENANCE OF A FIELD REVERSED CONFIGURATION BY MEANS OF A ROTATING MAGNETIC FIELD

An experiment in which a rotating magnetic field was used to drive current in a cylindrical device was described. The driven current was of sufficient size to reverse the applied axial field. such an equilibrium could equally well be termed a field reversed configuration (FRC). In this experiment the FRC lifetime appeared to be limited by the duration of the rotating field pulse (40ms) with no evidence of gross instabilities.