Confinement and stability of plasmas in a field-reversed configuration

Abstract

Experiments have been conducted on the LSX device where plasmas confined in a field-reversed magnetic geometry have exhibited record energy, particle, and configuration lifetimes. The scaling from previous smaller devices showed a very positive confinement scaling with s, the number of ion gyroradii inside the field-reversed configuration. These plasmas were observed to have gross stability to global low-order modes such as the internal tilt. The growth of tilt instabilities were not observed during the equilibrium decay of plasmas up to s\ensuremath{\sim}8.