Reversed field pinch experiments

The Reversatron RFP is usually operated with toroidal field windings which are a continuous helix of 144 turns. These windings produce a poloidal current which is uniform around the torus. The distribution of current is fixed by the geometry so that the applied field has only an m = 0, n = 0 component. The windings cannot act to stabilize an m = 0 mode with absolute value of n greater than 0 or any m = 1 mode because these modes will excite no current in the windings. It has recently been suggested that parallel connected field coils might act as a shell by forcing the flux within each winding to be the same. Coils connected in parallel must have the same voltage at their terminals and thus must enclose the same volt-seconds or flux. Data from ZT-40 show that the discharges are more quiescent when parallel or series-parallel connected windings are used.