Z-Pinch

A Z pinch is a plasma confinement device, one of the earliest fusion approaches alongside the stellarator and the magnetic mirror, that runs an electric current through a column of plasma along its axis to generate a magnetic field that compresses the plasma inward through the Lorentz force, with gas pressure resisting the contraction; it is named for the z axis direction of the current, and the effect was originally called the Bennett pinch after Willard Harrison Bennett. Research on the concept began in the United Kingdom in the years after the Second World War and gained momentum following the announcement of the Huemul Project in 1951; the UK ZETA device produced bursts of neutrons by the summer of 1957, which were initially taken as a sign of fusion but later proved misleading, since the machine was not actually reaching fusion conditions, and interest in the approach faded as a result. Soviet scientists later adapted the pinch principle into the tokamak, which required a different distribution of energy and went on to become the most studied approach to controlled fusion.