Topological Arrest of Ballooning Modes in Nonaxisymmetric Toroidal Plasmas.

Authors

Amitava Bhattacharjee

Published in

Physical review letters. Volume 137. Issue 10. Pages 105101. Sep 04, 2026.

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.

PMID:
42758976
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 19 Sep 2026.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.