Open Gate: The Plug Regime Is Beyond Any Device
The plug's required operating point sits 166–830× beyond the regime any mirror device has reached — so today it cannot be post-dicted against experiment.
What the simulation found
The plug must hold a combination of field, pressure, and confinement far outside the space that operating mirror machines have explored. Our design study places the required plug operating point 166–830× beyond the demonstrated regime of any existing device. Because no experiment has run there, the plug's behavior is a prediction, not a post-diction — there is no measured data set to validate it against today.
The devices we compare against
- GDT (Budker Institute) — gas-dynamic trap, high-beta mirror operation
- GAMMA-10 / PDX (Tsukuba) — tandem-mirror confinement and potential formation
- TMX-U (LLNL, historical) — thermal-barrier tandem-mirror experiments
- C-2W / Norman (TAE) — advanced beam-driven field-reversed / mirror hybrids
Against the best-published operating points of these machines, the burner plug is off the chart — hence the 166–830× band, depending on which parameter combination you hold fixed.
Why we publish this
An honest program states plainly which of its results are validated and which are extrapolations. This one is an extrapolation. Naming the distance to the nearest experiment is how we scope the physics campaign that has to close it.
Honest status
Design-and-simulation only. The regime is un-post-dictable with current data; closing this gate requires new experimental points between today's devices and the burner design point — not a louder claim.
Sources. Kronos burner design study (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21746479); these multipliers are our own simulation findings, stated against public benchmarks.