MagLIF — magnetised liner inertial fusion
Three stages define the class: axial premagnetisation of the fuel, laser preheat of the fuel column, and a pulsed-power implosion of the conducting cylindrical liner that compresses fuel and flux together. SCPN-MIF-MAGLIF-CORE owns the device truth of the maglif configuration.
What the configuration is
A MagLIF target is a small metal cylinder — the liner — filled with fusion fuel. Before the shot, a coil pair puts an axial magnetic field through the fuel. A laser then heats the fuel column through a window at one end. Finally a very large axial current flows through the liner; the azimuthal field of that current drives the liner inward at tens of kilometres per second, and because the liner is a good conductor it carries the axial flux with it. The fuel is compressed and heated adiabatically; the compressed field slows heat conduction out of it. The preheat matters because the compression starts from a warmer column and needs a smaller convergence to reach a given temperature.
The instability that limits the scheme is magneto-Rayleigh–Taylor at the accelerating liner surface; the core carries it as a budget declaration, and the growth rate itself lives in SCPN-Fusion-Core.
What the core owns
- the device boundary: plant and experiment truth, shot lifecycle and configuration policy for the three-stage scheme;
- stage-coupling semantics as device truth: premagnetisation field declarations, preheat energy-coupling declarations, liner integrity and magneto-Rayleigh–Taylor budgets, and flux-compression declarations;
- diagnostic semantics, reference frames and clock identity declarations;
- actuator-response model boundaries and the declared safety envelope; the device-owned CONTROL adapter specification;
- the binding to the SCPN Phase Orchestrator reactor registry (version 1.0.0) and the machine-readable domain manifest.
What it explicitly excludes
- Generic axial-current Z-pinch devices (unlined, unmagnetised columns): SCPN-Z-PINCH-CORE.
- Unmagnetised laser ICF (the preheat laser here is a stage, not a driver): SCPN-ICF-LASER-CORE.
- Plasma-jet liner compression: SCPN-MIF-PLASMA-JET-CORE; mechanical and liquid liners: SCPN-MIF-LINER-CORE.
- Solver mathematics and validation evidence: SCPN-Fusion-Core, until an exact surface passes the reactor family migration gate; no solver code exists in, or was copied into, the device core.
- Typed signal semantics and comparability: SCPN-Phase-Orchestrator (review-only output, never actuation).
- Control admission and action formation: SCPN-Control is the sole software authority that forms an admitted control action.
- Machine protection: independent systems retain the final veto.
- Portfolio presentation, identity, entitlement and execution gating: SCPN-Studio.
Level-0 physics and its anchor
The core evaluates the three stages mechanically — the azimuthal field \(\mu_0 I/2\pi r\) at the liner surface and its magnetic pressure, the liner mass and implosion kinetic energy at a declared velocity, the preheat energy per unit fuel volume — and the stagnation limits by axial flux conservation \(B_z C^2\) and adiabatic compression \(C^{2(\gamma-1)}\), both recorded as upper bounds.
Anchored on printed values. The filed chapter SAND2021-3239B prints a liner 10 mm tall, 5 mm in outer diameter and 0.5 mm in wall, and a first integrated experiment with a 10 T axial field, 0.5 kJ of deposited preheat and 18 MA of peak load current. The aspect ratio those two liner numbers give is exactly 5.0. The peak implosion velocity is printed as a range, 70 to 100 km/s, and a value is declared from inside it. Declared, and said to be declared: the liner material density (beryllium, 1850 kg/m³), the convergence ratio and the adiabatic index. The filed source is a related public chapter; the cited Phys. Plasmas 17 (2010) 056303 is behind a subscription and is not on file, and nothing implies it was read.
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Non-claims
- No equation of motion, equation of state or transport equation is solved.
- The compressed axial field is the perfect-conductor limit and the compressed temperature the loss-free limit; both are upper bounds, never predictions.
- The drive field is the vacuum field of an axial current at the liner surface; no circuit, no current distribution and no instability is modelled.
- No yield, gain, reactivity, confinement or breakeven statement is made, and no value describes or validates a real machine.
- The repository is not machine-ready, not safety-certified and not reactor-ready; liner-material, preheat-scheme and fuel choices are configuration facets, not separate claims.
Capabilities and evidence
Evidence maturity computational_prototype, five implemented capabilities, each with its evidence record in VALIDATION.md: the device configuration model (validated parameter objects with documented consistency estimates, canonical serialisation, a data-only SPO registry pin); the diagnostic and clock semantics model (synthetic channel and clock declarations aligned fail-closed with the pinned SPO observability catalogue); level-0 device physics (the closed forms on this page); the device 3D model and the device CAD model (one body per stage of the drive, tessellated on the shared kernel library and built again as exact solids). No parameter set or channel describes any real machine or diagnostic; the claim inventory is empty and verified by the domain validator.