Influence of impurity and recycling on high-β steady-state plasmas sustained by rotating magnetic fields current drive

Abstract

A new upgrade of the Translation, Confinement, and Sustainment (TCS) device, TCSU, has been built to form and sustain high temperature compact toroids (CT), known as Field Reversed Configurations, using Rotating Magnetic Fields (RMF). In TCS the plasma temperature was limited to several 10s of eV due to high impurity content. These impurities are greatly reduced in TCSU by using advanced plasma chamber and helium glow discharge cleaning. Reducing impurity radiation, when coupled with reduced overall recycling, enabled the plasma to enter into a new, collisionless regime with temperatures well over 200 eV, substantially exceeding the radiation barrier. This is a first for CTs at low input power density. This was achieved using the simple even-parity RMF drive (despite transient opening of field lines by the RMF) because the associated energy loss is sheath-limited, coupled with the low edge density resulting from the RMF pinch effect.