Quantum chaos theory and the spectrum of ideal-MHD instabilities in toroidal plasmas

Abstract

In a fully 3-D system such as a stellarator, the toroidal mode number $n$ ceases to be a good quantum number--all $n$s within a given mode family being coupled. It is found that the discrete spectrum of unstable ideal MHD (magnetohydrodynamic) instabilities ceases to exist unless MHD is modified (regularized) by introducing a short-perpendicular-wavelength cutoff. Attempts to use ray tracing to estimate the regularized MHD spectrum fail due to the occurrence of chaotic ray trajectories. In quantum chaos theory, strong chaos in the semiclassical limit leads to eigenvalue statistics the same as those of a suitable ensemble of random matrices. For instance, the probability distribution function for the separation between neighboring eigenvalues is as derived from random matrix theory and goes to zero at zero separation. This contrasts with the Poissonian distribution found in separable systems, showing that a signature of quantum chaos is level repulsion. In order to determine whether eigenvalues of the regularized MHD problem obey the same statistics as those of the Schrödinger equation in both the separable 1-D case and the chaotic 3-D cases, we have assembled data sets of ideal MHD eigenvalues for a Suydam-unstable cylindrical (1-D) equilibrium using \emph{Mathematica} and a Mercier-unstable (3-D) equilibrium using the CAS3D code. In the 1-D case, we find that the unregularized Suydam-approximation spectrum has an anomalous peak at zero eigenvalue separation. On the other hand, regularization by restricting the domain of $\kvec_{\perp}$ recovers the expected Poissonian distribution. In the 3-D case we find strong evidence of level repulsion within mode families, but mixing mode families produces Poissonian statistics.