Paper detail

Stellarators close to quasisymmetry

Rotation is favorable for confinement, but a stellarator can rotate at high speeds if and only if it is sufficiently close to quasisymmetry. This article investigates how close it needs to be. For a magnetic field $\mathbf{B} = \mathbf{B}_0 + α\mathbf{B}_1$, where $\mathbf{B}_0$ is quasisymmetric, $α\mathbf{B}_1$ is a deviation from quasisymmetry, and $α\ll 1$, the stellarator can rotate at high velocities if $α< ε^{1/2}$, with $ε$ the ion Larmor radius over the characteristic variation length of $\mathbf{B}_0$. The cases in which this result may break down are discussed. If the stellarator is sufficiently quasisymmetric in the above sense, the rotation profile, and equivalently, the long-wavelength radial electric field, are not set neoclassically; instead, they can be affected by turbulent transport. Their computation requires the $O(ε^2)$ pieces of both the turbulent and the long-wavelength components of the distribution function. This article contains the first step towards a formulation to calculate the rotation profile by providing the equations determining the long-wavelength components of the $O(ε^2)$ pieces.