Internal magnetic field measurement on C-2 field-reversed configuration plasmas

Abstract

A long-lived field-reversed configuration (FRC) plasma has been produced in the C-2 device by dynamically colliding and merging two oppositely directed, highly supersonic compact toroids (CTs). The reversed-field structure of the translated CTs and final merged-FRC state have been directly verified by probing the internal magnetic field structure using a multi-channel magnetic probe array near the midplane of the C-2 confinement chamber. Each of the two translated CTs exhibits significant toroidal fields (B t) with opposite helicity, and a relatively large B t remains inside the separatrix after merging. © 2012 American Institute of Physics.