KRONOS·FUSION
Technical Library › Glossary of Fusion & Plasma Terms
Glossary

Quasineutrality

A plasma's tendency to keep equal ion and electron densities over any appreciable scale.

Beyond the tiny Debye length, a plasma maintains nearly equal positive and negative charge densities; any imbalance sets up strong restoring fields. Quasineutrality underlies the ambipolar physics that plugs the tandem mirror.