CONFINEMENT AND STABILITY OF PLASMAS IN A FIELD-REVERSED CONFIGURATION

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 was not observed during the equilibrium decay of plasmas up to s is similar to 8.