Magnetic fields with general omnigenity
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.
- Publication:
-
Journal of Plasma Physics
- Pub Date:
- February 2024
- DOI:
- 10.1017/S0022377824000151
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2305.08026
- Bibcode:
- 2024JPlPh..90a9020D
- Keywords:
-
- fusion plasma;
- plasma confinement;
- Physics - Plasma Physics;
- Mathematics - Optimization and Control
- E-Print:
- 14 pages, 4 figures