It Works!

Today, February 26, 2010 I turned the completed reactor on for the first time and it performed wonderfully! At a vacuum pressure of 20 microns and a potential of -1500V on the inner grid, a bright purple-colored plasma was observed. On the very first run, I was able to adjust the variac all the way to full power (-10kV on the inner grid) but the high voltage managed to arc from the container to the metal guide wire in the vacuum hose, grounding the whole system and extinguishing the plasma. After that we were not able to get the voltage past -5kV, but we still managed to get plasma, and played around with varying the voltage and pressure in the chamber. Below is a video of one of the runs:

As you can hear in the video, the plasma starts to appear when the variac is at 20 volts (corresponding to roughly -1500V from the power supply). From what I have read so far, the shape of the plasma is due in part to the geometry of the inner grid, and the jet, or "bugle" coming out of the left side has to do with how the grid is shaped.

While this plasma looks really cool, this test was just the first in a series of steps to achieving nuclear fusion. This test run was just done on atmospheric gas, which is much too heavy to fuse with the voltages that I am running at. However, the next step is to build an inlet to let deuterium gas into the chamber, which should fuse when the reactor is turned on.