Parallel resistivity and ohmic heating of laboratory dipole plasmas

Abstract

The parallel resistivity is calculated in the long-mean-free-path regime for the dipole plasma geometry; this is shown to be a neoclassical transport problem in the limit of a small number of circulating electrons. In this regime, the resistivity is substantially higher than the Spitzer resistivity due to the magnetic trapping of a majority of the electrons. This suggests that heating the outer flux surfaces of the plasma with low-frequency parallel electric fields can be substantially more efficient than might be naively estimated. Such a skin-current heating scheme is analyzed by deriving an equation for diffusion of skin currents into the plasma, from which quantities such as the resistive skin-depth, lumped-circuit impedance, and power deposited in the plasma can be estimated. Numerical estimates indicate that this may be a simple and efficient way to couple power into experiments in this geometry.