Magnetic well and Mercier stability of stellarators near the magnetic axis

We have recently demonstrated that by expanding in small distance from the magnetic axis compared with the major radius, stellarator shapes with low neoclassical transport can be generated efficiently. To extend the utility of this new design approach, here we evaluate measures of magnetohydrodynamic interchange stability within the same expansion. In particular, we evaluate the magnetic well, Mercier's criterion, and resistive interchange stability near a magnetic axis of arbitrary shape. In contrast to previous work on interchange stability near the magnetic axis, which used an expansion of the flux coordinates, here we use the ‘inverse expansion’ in which the flux coordinates are the independent variables. Reduced expressions are presented for the magnetic well and stability criterion in the case of quasisymmetry. The analytic results are shown to agree with calculations from the VMEC equilibrium code. Finally, we show that near the axis, Glasser, Greene and Johnson's stability criterion for resistive modes approximately coincides with Mercier's ideal condition.

Stellarator equilibria with reactor relevant energetic particle losses

Stellarator configurations with reactor relevant energetic particle losses are constructed by simultaneously optimizing for quasisymmetry and an analytically derived metric ( $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}_{c}$ ), which attempts to align contours of the second adiabatic invariant, $J_{\Vert }$ with magnetic surfaces. Results show that with this optimization scheme it is possible to generate quasihelically symmetric equilibria on the scale of ARIES-CS which completely eliminate all collisionless alpha particle losses within normalized radius $r/a=0.3$ . We show that the best performance is obtained by reducing losses at the trapped–passing boundary. Energetic particle transport can be improved even when neoclassical transport, as calculated using the metric $\unicode[STIX]{x1D716}_{\text{eff}}$ , is degraded. Several quasihelically symmetric equilibria with different aspect ratios are presented, all with excellent energetic particle confinement.

The importance of the classical channel in the impurity transport of optimized stellarators

In toroidal magnetic confinement devices, such as tokamaks and stellarators, neoclassical transport is usually an order of magnitude larger than its classical counterpart. However, when a high-collisionality species is present in a stellarator optimized for low Pfirsch–Schlüter current, its classical transport can be comparable to the neoclassical transport. In this letter, we compare neoclassical and classical fluxes and transport coefficients calculated for Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) and Large Helical Device (LHD) cases. In W7-X, we find that the classical transport of a collisional impurity is comparable to the neoclassical transport for all radii, while it is negligible in the LHD cases, except in the vicinity of radii where the neoclassical transport changes sign. In the LHD case, electrostatic potential variations on the flux surface significantly enhance the neoclassical impurity transport, while the classical transport is largely insensitive to this effect in the cases studied.