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Topological Arrest of Ballooning Modes in Nonaxisymmetric Toroidal Plasmas
1Princeton University, Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA.
Abstract:
Why do nonaxisymmetric stellarators avoid ballooning crashes that afflict tokamaks? Three-dimensional geometry induces Anderson localization of ballooning modes, converting a global instability into a Ginzburg-Landau network of isolated wave packets. Global stability reduces to a percolation problem: Below a critical threshold, instability is arrested; above it, a crash occurs. This explains benign stellarator saturation, predicts vulnerability in quasisymmetric designs, and introduces the critical threshold as a nonlinear stability metric for reactor optimization, pending experimental validation.
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