Tilt stability of a gyroviscous field-reversed configuration with realistic equilibria

Abstract

The gyroviscous fluid theory [L. C. Steinhauer and A. Ishida, Phys. Fluids B 2, 2422 (1990)] is applied to the tilting instability of field-reversed configurations (FRC) using realistic equilibria and a more complete basis set than in the previous treatment. This leads to two important new results. (1) Quantitative agreement is found for the first time between experiment and the theory of FRC tilting stability, i.e., the stability of nearly all FRCs can be explained by the gyroviscous theory. (2) Quantitative agreement (within 30%) is also found between the gyroviscous theory (with modifications to account approximately for parallel kinetics and the Hall effect) and the more complete—but harder to apply—Vlasov-fluid model.