Magnetic trapping caused by resonant perturbations in tokamaks with reversed magnetic shear

摘要

Reversed magnetic shear configurations in tokamaks reduce substantially particle diffusivity and improve plasma confinement due to the formation of a transport barrier, as a result of magnetic field line reconnection and bifurcation. The latter are caused by the resonant perturbation of an ergodic limiter on a tokamak with reversed magnetic shear, which creates a region with chaotic field lines in the vicinity of the dimerized island chains. An analytically derived nontwist map for field lines is used to describe the formation of a transport barrier, manifested in the decrease of field line diffusion rate. This barrier appears due to the chaotic field line trapping near the reconnection layer that survives the bifurcation. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics. [References: 41]