Abstract. Compact optimized stellarators offer novel solutions for confining high-beta plasmas and developing magnetic confinement fusion. The 3D plasma shape can be designed to enhance the MHD stability without feedback or nearby conducting structures and provide drift-orbit confinement similar to tokamaks. These configurations offer the possibility of combining the steady-state low-recirculating power, external control, and disruption resilience of previous stellarators with the low-aspect ratio, high beta-limit, and good confinement of advanced tokamaks. Quasi-axisymmetric equilibria have been developed for the proposed National Compact Stellarator Experiment (NCSX) with average aspect ratio 4 -4.4 and average elongation ~1.8. Even with bootstrap-current consistent profiles, they are passively stable to the ballooning, kink, vertical, Mercier, and neoclassical-tearing modes for β > 4%, without the need for external feedback or conducting walls. The bootstrap current generates only 1/4 of the magnetic rotational transform at β=4% (the rest is from the coils), thus the equilibrium is much less non-linear and is more controllable than similar advanced tokamaks. The enhanced stability is a result of 'reversed' global shear, the spatial distribution of local shear, and the large fraction of externally generated transform. Transport simulations show adequate fast-ion confinement and thermal neoclassical transport similar to equivalent tokamaks. Modular coils have been designed which reproduce the physics properties, provide good flux surfaces, and allow flexible variation of the plasma shape to control the predicted MHD stability and transport properties.3
Radio frequency (rf) power is commonly applied to the chuck of a high-density plasma reactor in order to extract ions and to control the energy of the ions used for the fabrication of microelectronic devices. In many cases, the temporal shape of the rf wave form largely determines the shape of the spectrum of those extracted ions, thereby strongly affecting feature evolution. Using auxiliary rf circuits, we successfully made major changes to the rf-potential wave form at the chuck of an Applied Materials 5300 HDP Omega reactor without affecting the normal functioning of the reactor’s control systems. This work established the practical feasibility of techniques for modifying the ion energy distribution functions of industrial reactors.
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