Simons’ Hour Talk - Understanding the Space of Quasisymmetric Configurations: Phases and Phase Transitions

Date
Jan 20, 2022, 8:00 am9:00 am

Speaker

Details

Event Description

A Virtual Simons' Hour Talk: Understanding the Space of Quasisymmetric Configurations: Phases and Phase Transitions

Given by: Eduardo Rodriguez
Affiliation: Princeton Plasma Physics Lab

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

Abstract: Optimisation plays a central role in the pursuit of viable stellarator designs. Customarily, such designs result from a search in a large parameter space, guided by desirable physics requirements. This approach has proven useful but the complexity of the space makes the approach, to a large extent, a 'black box'.
The talk presents our attempt to shed light on the space of quasisymmetric configurations. We identify designs with a reduced set of functions and parameters that describe the configurations approximately by expansions about their magnet axes. This allows us to structure the space in an effective and powerful way. The presentation will focus on the first step in this approach, which identifies configurations at the most basic level through fundamental geometric properties of their magnetic axes. We show that this reduced level of description is sufficient to naturally divide the space of configurations into quasisymmetric phases and phase transitions. The basic structure of the space can be leveraged to contextualise typical quasisymmetric designs and describe several important properties. We will also present some results on extensions of the basic reduced model.