Mataira says that more common fusion device designs like tokamaks or stellarators try to confine those magnetic field lines within the machine and not touching anything. The New Zealand team’s design based on planet magnetospheres is different.

“In a magnetosphere or planet, you have something to touch. These particles eventually find their way to the poles of a planet. That’s what we call the Aurora Australis and Borealis. And in our experiment, that’s also true. Those highest energy particles make their way to the support structure of our system, and that ultimately suppresses the temperatures that we can produce.

“We can solve that with levitation and then get into the deeper, unsolved problems around dipoles that we want to test in our next machines,” Mataira says.