Controlling turbulence in present and future stellarators

Phys Rev Lett. 2014 Oct 10;113(15):155001. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.155001. Epub 2014 Oct 7.

Abstract

Turbulence is widely expected to limit the confinement and, thus, the overall performance of modern neoclassically optimized stellarators. We employ novel petaflop-scale gyrokinetic simulations to predict the distribution of turbulence fluctuations and the related transport scaling on entire stellarator magnetic surfaces and reveal striking differences to tokamaks. Using a stochastic global-search optimization method, we derive the first turbulence-optimized stellarator configuration stemming from an existing quasiomnigenous design.