Are ghost surfaces quadratic-flux-minimizing?
Abstract
Two candidates for "almost-invariant" toroidal surfaces passing through magnetic islands, namely quadratic-flux-minimizing (QFMin) surfaces and ghost surfaces, use families of periodic pseudo-orbits (i.e. paths for which the action is not exactly extremal). QFMin pseudo-orbits, which are coordinate-dependent, are field lines obtained from a modified magnetic field, and ghost-surface pseudo-orbits are obtained by displacing closed field lines in the direction of steepest descent of magnetic action, . A generalized Hamiltonian definition of ghost surfaces is given and specialized to the usual Lagrangian definition. A modified Hamilton's Principle is introduced that allows the use of Lagrangian integration for calculation of the QFMin pseudo-orbits. Numerical calculations show QFMin and Lagrangian ghost surfaces give very similar results for a chaotic magnetic field perturbed from an integrable case, and this is explained using a perturbative construction of an auxiliary poloidal angle for which QFMin and Lagrangian ghost surfaces are the same up to second order. While presented in the context of 3-dimensional magnetic field line systems, the concepts are applicable to defining almost-invariant tori in other degree-of-freedom nonintegrable Lagrangian/Hamiltonian systems.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0909.2096,
title = {Are ghost surfaces quadratic-flux-minimizing?},
author = {S. R. Hudson and R. L. Dewar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0909.2096},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
8 pages, 3 figures. Revised version includes post-publication corrections in text, as described in Appendix C Erratum