On the Shafranov shift in stellarators

Abstract

As first shown by Shafranov, toroidal plasmas in magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium tend to expand in major radius when the pressure is increased. Here, an average measure of the resulting Shafranov shift is introduced, and its properties are discussed for various classes of optimised stellarator configurations. It is shown to be particularly small in quasi-helical and quasi-isodynamic stellarators with a large number of field periods, which are thus particularly robust to variations in the plasma pressure.