Confinement of pure electron plasmas in the CNT stellarator

The Columbia Non-neutral Torus is a stellarator devoted to non-neutral and electron- positron plasma research. Confinement and transport processes have been studied in some detail now, and an understanding of these processes has emerged. Transport is driven in two ways: The presence of internal rods, and the presence of neutrals. Both transport processes are clearly distinguished experimentally, and a model of the rod driven transport has been developed, yielding very good agreement with experimental data. The neutral driven transport is faster than originally expected and indicates the presence of unconfined orbits in CNT. Numerical modeling of the electron orbits in CNT confirms the existence of loss orbits and shows that a flux surface conforming electrostatic boundary will greatly improve confinement. Such a boundary has now been installed in CNT, with initial results showing an order of magnitude improvement in confinement.