A new method to suppress the Rayleigh-Taylor instability in a linear device

Rayleigh-Taylor instability (RTI) is a primary hurdle for many different fusion approaches, most of which rely on external pressure to stabilize the plasma by impeding plasma displacement. In this paper, we report a novel method that utilizes a rotating magnetic field (RMF) to drive an azimuthal electron current to reduce the charge separation caused by RTI. The fluctuation measured in the central cell of the mirror device, approximately half a device length away from the RMF, is identified as the m = 1 mode and is suppressed by the RMF in the plug cell. The azimuthal electric fields of the fluctuation are found to decrease to almost zero, and the radial confinement is improved by more than a factor of ten. The separation of the RMF region from the central cell makes this stabilization method unique because the RMF, which can complicate the local magnetic field lines, has little influence on the magnetic field configuration in the central cell. This study may shed light on the use of resonant magnetic perturbations in tokamaks as well as on stabilization methods for many other fusion experiments.