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Main Authors: Liu, Hengqian, Yu, Guodong, Zhu, Caoxiang, Velasco, José Luis, Gaur, Rahul, Panici, Dario, Kolemen, Egemen, Yu, Mingyang, Ding, Weixing, Wang, Shaojie, Zhuang, Ge
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09350
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author Liu, Hengqian
Yu, Guodong
Zhu, Caoxiang
Velasco, José Luis
Gaur, Rahul
Panici, Dario
Kolemen, Egemen
Yu, Mingyang
Ding, Weixing
Wang, Shaojie
Zhuang, Ge
author_facet Liu, Hengqian
Yu, Guodong
Zhu, Caoxiang
Velasco, José Luis
Gaur, Rahul
Panici, Dario
Kolemen, Egemen
Yu, Mingyang
Ding, Weixing
Wang, Shaojie
Zhuang, Ge
contents Stellarators confine fusion plasmas using three-dimensional magnetic fields composed of nested toroidal magnetic surfaces. In generic stellarators, trapped particles can drift across these surfaces and degrade plasma confinement. Certain topological properties of the magnetic field strength can suppress these drifts. However, conventional stellarator design approaches typically enforce restrictive constraints to realize such properties, thereby segmenting and limiting the accessible configuration space. In this work, we reformulate the conditions for efficient confinement as constraints on a homeomorphic straightening transformation of the field contours. Within this framework, the various families of stellarator magnetic fields optimized for plasma confinement arise naturally as specific realizations of a unified mapping. This new perspective provides a significantly more comprehensive description of viable stellarator configurations, enabling systematic exploration of trade-offs among confinement quality, geometric complexity, and engineering requirements. We illustrate this approach by presenting a highly compact stellarator design that nevertheless achieves plasma performance comparable to that of leading reactor-scale designs with much larger aspect ratios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_09350
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Optimizing stellarators with hidden symmetry
Liu, Hengqian
Yu, Guodong
Zhu, Caoxiang
Velasco, José Luis
Gaur, Rahul
Panici, Dario
Kolemen, Egemen
Yu, Mingyang
Ding, Weixing
Wang, Shaojie
Zhuang, Ge
Plasma Physics
Stellarators confine fusion plasmas using three-dimensional magnetic fields composed of nested toroidal magnetic surfaces. In generic stellarators, trapped particles can drift across these surfaces and degrade plasma confinement. Certain topological properties of the magnetic field strength can suppress these drifts. However, conventional stellarator design approaches typically enforce restrictive constraints to realize such properties, thereby segmenting and limiting the accessible configuration space. In this work, we reformulate the conditions for efficient confinement as constraints on a homeomorphic straightening transformation of the field contours. Within this framework, the various families of stellarator magnetic fields optimized for plasma confinement arise naturally as specific realizations of a unified mapping. This new perspective provides a significantly more comprehensive description of viable stellarator configurations, enabling systematic exploration of trade-offs among confinement quality, geometric complexity, and engineering requirements. We illustrate this approach by presenting a highly compact stellarator design that nevertheless achieves plasma performance comparable to that of leading reactor-scale designs with much larger aspect ratios.
title Optimizing stellarators with hidden symmetry
topic Plasma Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09350