about theory
meetings
people
projects
publications
review
home
Stellarator Physics
Excellent progress on key physics issues arising in the design of a compact stellarator experiment has continued to be made in the past year with numerous papers published. Results include:
MHD
Substantial advances have been made during the past years in understanding the 3-D stabilization of external kink modes and in the application of that understanding to improved stellarator designs. A key conclusion is that kink stability can be independently controlled through externally generated shear and through an appropriate 3-D corrugation of the plasma boundary that produces little shear. To produce the required corrugation, the Terpsichore stability code, which has been modified to improve its robustness and flexibility, is now coupled to an optimizer.
Email Guo-Yong Fu for more information on Stellarator Physics MHD.
Transport
Comparison of Monte Carlo bootstrap calculations with analytic bootstrap expressions has led to an understanding of resonances that appear in the standard analytic expressions, and to an improved treatment that has been incorporated into the bootstrap code imported from NIFS (Japan). Application of the new gyrokinetic GTC code (which includes a momentum conserving collision operator and electric field effects) to the analysis of neoclassical transport in QA configurations have uniquely provided more accurate estimates of the global confinement times. Progress in the microinstability area has featured the generalization of the FULL code from using only axisymmetric MHD equilibria to using fully 3-D stellarator equilibria. The electrostatic version of this code has now been interfaced with 3-D numerical equilibria computed with the VMEC code.
Email Harry Mynick for more information on Stellarator Physics Transport.
Design
An important innovative advance in developing 3-D coil design tools involved the use of singular value decomposition (SVD) techniques for stellarator coil optimization. This has made practical the "reverse engineering" technique of first finding a desirable plasma configuration, and then later developing an "optimized" set of buildable coils that could produce this.
Email Neil Pomphrey for more information on Stellarator Physics Design.
about theory | meetings | people | projects | publications | review | home
all content © Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory