magnetized target fusion (MTF) is a hybrid approach to 📝fusion that mechanically compresses a pre-magnetized plasma to fusion conditions, occupying the middle ground between the field's two dominant confinement strategies.
The distinction runs in both directions. 📝magnetic confinement fusion (MCF) holds a thin 📝plasma steadily with fields alone; 📝inertial confinement fusion (ICF) crushes dense fuel in a nanosecond and needs no field at all. Magnetized target fusion — also called magneto-inertial fusion — splits the difference: a target plasma carrying an embedded magnetic field is formed first, then imploded by a metal or liquid liner on microsecond timescales, reaching densities between the two regimes. The embedded field is the enabling trick — it throttles heat conduction out of the fuel during compression and helps trap fusion-born alpha particles, which lowers the required implosion speed and precision enough that pistons and pulsed-power machines can replace billion-dollar lasers as drivers.
The most common target plasma is the 📝field-reversed configuration (FRC). Implementations differ mainly in the liner: General Fusion compresses plasma inside a rotating liquid-metal cavity driven by pistons, Sandia National Laboratories' MagLIF concept implodes a current-carrying metal liner around laser-preheated fuel, and Helion's compression of colliding FRCs belongs to the same magneto-inertial family.