What is it about?
To make magnetically confined nuclear fusion devices one needs a configuration for which the plasma is near equilibrium. The force from the current and magnetic field must balance that from the pressure gradient. One way to create these is with a nested family of toroidal current sheets across which the pressure jumps. The paper addresses conditions for existence of solutions of this type.
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Why is it important?
A dream is to produce controlled nuclear fusion power. The emphasis has been on nearly axisymmetric configurations but they suffer from requiring a strong toroidal current. This can be substantially reduced in well designed non-axisymmetric configurations but the only such equilibria known to exist at present are of the type with current sheets and pressure jumps.
Perspectives
The paper is in memory of Bob Dewar who realised the significance of early results about existence of such equilibria and developed them into a computational construction.
Robert MacKay
University of Warwick
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Invariant tori for the pressure-jump Hamiltonian, Physics of Plasmas, May 2025, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/5.0258987.
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