Related papers: Computing Flux-Surface Shapes in Tokamaks and Stel…
Quasisymmetric stellarators are appealing intellectually and as fusion reactor candidates since the guiding center particle trajectories and neoclassical transport are isomorphic to those in a tokamak, implying good confinement. Previously,…
Optimized stellarator configurations and their analytical properties are obtained using a near-axis expansion approach. Such configurations are associated with good confinement as the guiding center particle trajectories and neoclassical…
How much does the cross-section of a toroidal magnetic field configuration tell us about its MHD stability? It is generally believed that positive triangularity (typically leading to bean-shaped cross-sections with their indentation on the…
A method is demonstrated to rapidly calculate the shapes and properties of quasi-axisymmetric and quasi-helically symmetric stellarators. In this approach, optimization is applied to the equations of magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium and…
Stellarators are generically small current and low plasma beta ($\beta= p/B^2\ll1$) devices. Often the construction of vacuum magnetic fields with good magnetic surfaces is the starting point for an equilibrium calculation. Although in…
Optimising stellarators for quasisymmetry leads to strongly reduced collisional transport and energetic particle losses compared to unoptimised configurations. Though stellarators with precise quasisymmetry have been obtained in the past,…
A direct construction of equilibrium magnetic fields with toroidal topology at arbitrary order in the distance from the magnetic axis is carried out, yielding an analytical framework able to explore the landscape of possible magnetic flux…
A method is given to rapidly compute quasisymmetric stellarator magnetic fields for plasma confinement, without the need to call a three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium code inside an optimization iteration. The method is based…
A new paradigm for rapid stellarator configuration design has been recently demonstrated, in which the shapes of quasisymmetric or omnigenous flux surfaces are computed directly using an expansion in small distance from the magnetic axis.…
We develop the formalism of the first order near-axis expansion of the MHD equilibrium equations described in Garren & Boozer (1991), Plunk et al. (2019) and Plunk et al. (2021), for the case of a quasi-isodynamic, N-field period,…
Quasisymmetry (QS), a hidden symmetry of the magnetic field strength, is known to support nested flux surfaces and provide superior particle confinement in stellarators. In this work, we study the ideal MHD equilibrium and stability of…
Bulk toroidal rotation has proven capable of stabilising both dangerous MHD modes and turbulence. In this thesis, we explore a method to drive rotation in large tokamaks: up-down asymmetry in the magnetic equilibrium. We seek to maximise…
We present a technique that can be used to design stellarators with a high degree of experimental flexibility. For our purposes, flexibility is defined by the range of values the rotational transform can take on the magnetic axis of the…
Using a novel optimization procedure it has been shown that the Helically Symmetric eXperiment (HSX) stellarator can be optimized for reduced trapped-electron-mode (TEM) instability [M.J.~Gerard et al., \textit{Nucl.~Fusion} \textbf{63}…
A method is demonstrated to optimize a stellarator's geometry to eliminate magnetic islands and achieve other desired physics properties at the same time. For many physics quantities that have been used in stellarator optimization,…
In this work, the role which three-dimensional shaping plays in the generation of rotational transform in toroidal magnetically confinement devices is explored. The susceptance matrix as defined by Strand & Houlberg (2001) is presented and…
The near-axis theory for quasi-isodynamic stellarator equilibria is reformulated in terms of geometric inputs, to allow greater control of the ``direct construction'' of quasi-isodynamic configurations, and to facilitate understanding of…
Adjoint methods can speed up stellarator optimisation by providing gradient information more efficiently compared to finite-difference evaluations. Adjoint methods are herein applied to vacuum magnetic fields, with objective functions…
In this study, we explore the influence of the helicity of the magnetic axis-defined as the self-linking number of the curve-on the quality of quasi-isodynamic stellarator-symmetric configurations constructed using the near-axis expansion…
Most quasisymmetric stellarators to date have been designed by numerically optimizing the plasma boundary shape to minimize symmetry-breaking Fourier modes of the magnetic field strength $B$. At high aspect ratio, a faster approach is to…