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Magnetic fields with general omnigenity

Daniel Dudt, A. Goodman, Rory Conlin, Dario Panici, Egemen Kolemen

2024Journal of Plasma Physics16 citationsDOIOpen Access PDF

Abstract

Omnigenity is a desirable property of toroidal magnetic fields that ensures confinement of trapped particles. Confining charged particles is a basic requirement for any fusion power plant design, but it can be difficult to satisfy with the non-axisymmetric magnetic fields used by the stellarator approach. Every ideal magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium previously found to approximate omnigenity has been either axisymmetric, quasi-symmetric or has poloidally closed contours of magnetic field strength $B$ . However, general omnigenous equilibria are a much larger design space than these subsets. A new model is presented and employed in the DESC stellarator optimization suite to represent and discover the full parameter space of omnigenous equilibria. Although exact omnigenity aside from quasi-symmetry is impossible, these results reveal that excellent particle confinement can be achieved in practice. Examples far from quasi-symmetry with poloidally, helically and toroidally closed $B$ contours are attained with DESC and shown to have low neoclassical collisional transport and fast particle losses.

Topics & Concepts

StellaratorPhysicsToroidMagnetohydrodynamic driveSymmetry (geometry)Magnetic fieldRotational symmetryParticle (ecology)Space (punctuation)PlasmaClassical mechanicsMagnetohydrodynamicsMechanicsQuantum mechanicsGeometryPhilosophyLinguisticsOceanographyMathematicsGeologyMagnetic confinement fusion researchIonosphere and magnetosphere dynamicsSuperconducting Materials and Applications
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