Confinement transitions in the Wendelstein 7-AS stellarator [H. Renner et al., Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion 31, 1579 (1989)] can be induced by varying either the internal plasma current or the external magnetic field. In this paper we report on experiments where closely matched confinement states (good and bad) were constructed using the latter method. Analysis using the former scheme has been ...

HANBIT is a magnetic mirror confinement device. Recently, with almost finishing the first campaign for the basic system development, it started the second campaign for the high-temperature plasma confinement physics study in mirror configuration. Here, we introduce briefly the HANBIT device and report initial physics experiments results on RF-plasma heating and confinement in the simple mirror ...

Disruptive high b tokamak plasmas can be stabilized by the addition of a sheared toroidal flow. Nonlinear simulations demonstrate that confinement in flow-free high b tokamaks is rapidly destroyed by growing fingers of hot plasma that jet out from the center of the discharge to the wall. The added toroidal flow eliminates the growing fingers, maintaining confinement. As b increases further, the...

ITER will be the first fusion reactor and the 50 year old dream of fusion scientists will become reality. The quality of magnetic confinement will decide about the success of ITER, directly in the form of the confinement time and indirectly because it decides about the plasma parameters and the fluxes, which cross the separatrix and have to be handled externally by technical means. This lecture...

In modern thermonuclear fusion devices it is possible to distinguish distinct types of plasma confinement regimes which have different performance in terms of confinement time. Discriminating among them could represent a useful feature for an efficient control of a plasma experiment. An automatic identifier based on fuzzy logic is here proposed together with an unsupervised technique, using cla...

Three trap designs are proposed for the simultaneous confinement of neutral atoms and a non-neutral plasma in close proximity. One design uses axially symmetric static magnetic fields with a magnetic minimum in a ring around the trap axis. Axial symmetry is required for confinement of the rotating non-neutral plasma, and the magnetic minimum traps the neutral atoms. The second design uses a rot...

The Levitated Dipole Experiment (LDX) [J. Kesner, et al. in Fusion Energy 1998 3, 1165 (1999)] is a new research facility that is exploring the confinement and stability of plasma created within the dipole field produced by a strong superconducting magnet. Unlike other configurations in which stability depends on curvature and magnetic shear, magnetohydrodynamic stability of a dipole derives fr...