I'm rather far behind on the thread here... but from my vantage point, inertial electro-optical confinement and inertial electrostatic confinement have a number of similarities - they seem to work when the geometries are perfect. Whether it is wavefront symmetry or equipotential symmetry, the lack of it spoils the fun.
In a conservative field system (the IEC) the nearly perfectly elastic interaction of ions, means that the localizations of ion densities caused by the ion guns, will persist more or less permanently. Which seems to be borne out by the presence of rays in the photos of operating fusors. Were a complete homogenization of ion momenta occuring, there would be no rays, only a smooth ball. Further, (and I may be misunderstanding the operating mode here,) it would seem that the injected ion energy will always be greater than any of the interior potentials, meaning that the grid structures will be unable to fully reverse ion trajectories, before collisions occur with the structure itself.
Dave Cooper
Created on Monday, May 07, 2001 2:28 AM EDT by David Cooper