Turnstile area as a measure for chaotic transport in magnetic confinement fusion devices

Abstract

We analyze stochasticity in the magnetic fields of magnetic confinement fusion reactors by calculating the lobe areas of turnstiles - a method developed for characterizing transport into and out of resonance zones in Hamiltonian dynamical systems. We develop an efficient algorithm based on an action principle to calculate this quantity directly from the magnetic field, including stellarator magnetic fields which are sourced by a complicated set of three-dimensional coils. In the analyzed devices, the turnstile area on the inboard (plasma-facing) manifolds is much smaller than the turnstile area on the outboard (wall-facing) manifolds. The application of the turnstile area calculation for the design of future reactors will be discussed.