Plasma motion and equilibrium in unsymmetric magnetic fields

Abstract

The motion and equilibrium is investigated of a plasma confined by an arbitrary magnetic field where the lines of force are either closed inside the confinement volume or form a bottle between two magnetic mirrors, (a) Stationary states are treated for which macroscopic fluid motions are allowed to take place in the plasma. Such states represent a larger class of equilibria than the static ones where the plasma is assumed to be at rest all over space, (b) For a hot plasma confined i n a closed magnetic bottl e the fluid motions decay at essentially the same rate as the pressure gradients and the electric currents, (c) A modified deduction is presented of the average guiding centre drifts from field line to field line in the αβ space defined by the magnetic field. The drifts include contributions from the electric field and the magnetic gradient, (d) The contribution to the macroscopic particle flux from the gyro motion is averaged along the field lines to form a corresponding flux in αβ space. An average macroscopic fluid velocity is further obtained by superimposing the contributions from the guiding centre drifts and the gyro motion, (e) The mechanisms producing density changes and charge separation phenomena are treated in terms of the average macroscopic fluid velocity. They are found to be due to the average guiding centre drifts only, (f) An analysis is performed in terms of the velocities in αβ space of equilibria for which local fluid velocities are allowed to exist in the plasma. For a particular class of such states an electric field can be set up which, on the average, keeps the plasma at rest on each field line, (g ) The results indicate that plasma confinement should becom e possible in ring-current configurations with magnetically screened supports, provided that the plasma remains stable and that there are no excessive losses in the small weak field regions close to the leads where this analysis is inapplicable.