球状トーラスプラズマにおけるダブルパルスヘリシティ入射実験;球状トーラスプラズマにおけるダブルパルスヘリシティ入射実験;Experiment of Double-pulsing Helicity Injection on Helicity Injected Spherical Torus Plasmas

Coaxial Helicity Injection (CHI) is one of useful methods for start-up to spherical torus (ST) and spheromak plasmas. The new approach of CHI so called the Multi-pulsing CHI operation has been proposed for the purpose of achieving the quasi-steady-state plasma and demonstrated in the sustained spheromak physics experiment (SSPX) gun-spheromak device for the first time. We conducted the initial experiment with the first application of double-pulsing CHI for the ST configurations. The experimental results showed flux/current amplification and sustainment of the plasmas. We observed repeating the driven phase and the decay phase from change of profile of force-free parameter λ. By the double-pulsing CHI operation, the sustainment time had increased up to about 8 ms which was longer than that in the single discharge. We investigated dependency of plasma current, density and the current density profile on the external toroidal field strength.