Research Article

Confinement of proton beam in a magnetic mirror

¹ Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou 730070, P.R. China
² Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou 730000, P.R. China

^a e-mail: duanws@nwnu.edu.cn
^b e-mail: lyang@impcas.ac.cn

Received: 24 October 2018
Received in final form: 5 April 2019
Published online: 25 June 2019

Abstract

By using particle-in-cell(PIC) simulation method, the proton beam confinement in a magnetic mirror is investigated in the present paper. We define two physical quantities to describe the confinement effects of mirror for proton beam. One is loss rate Χ=N_lost/N₀, where N_lost is the number of leaked particles from the mirror and N₀ is the number of initial particles. The other is confinement time τ_m. Dependences of loss rate and confinement time on the parameters of both magnetic mirror and proton beam is given. It is found that the larger the mirror ratio, the less the loss rate, and the longer the confinement time. The appropriate proton beam velocity and other parameters of the protons can significantly improve the confinement time of the mirror and the efficiency of confinement.