A Virtual Simons Hour Talk: Magnetic Turnstiles in Nonresonant Stellarator Divertor

Given by: Alkesh Punjabi
Affiliation: Hampton University

Note the time: 8:00am EST / 13:00 UTC.
Zoom link will be sent via email.

ABSTRACT: Nonresonant stellarator divertors have a pair of magnetic flux tubes.  One has field lines that go from just outside the outermost confining surface to the surrounding chamber wall, and the other has lines that come inward from the wall.  This outward-inward action led to the name magnetic turnstile.  Plasma is diverted along both tubes of the pair.  The pair of flux tubes cross the annulus between the outermost confining surface and the walls through holes in magnetic cantori, which are the fractal remnants of magnetic surfaces.  The exiting and entering flux tubes can be adjacent as in the literature on turnstiles.  But, tubes were also found that have the unexpected feature of the entering and the exiting the region near the outermost confining surface at separated locations. Not only can there be two types of turnstiles but pseudo-turnstiles can also exist. A pseudo-turnstile is formed when an outer surface has a sufficiently large, although limited, radial excursion to strike the wall. The existence of non-adjacent and adjacent turnstiles and pseudo-turnstiles resolves issues that arose in earlier simulations of nonresonant stellarator divertors [A. Punjabi and A. H. Boozer, Phys. Plasmas 27, 012503 (2020)]