Role of external helical magnetic field in stabilizing the edge transport barrier in fusion devices

What is it about?

Resonant magnetic perturbations (RMPs) are external fields - aligned with the confining magnetic field - that are added to a magnetically-confined plasma to stabilize nonlinear oscillations of the edge transport barrier. Previous numerical simulations using RMPs with a single toroidal number but many poloidal harmonics have shown that the main effect is to 'erode' the transport barrier. Here, we confirm this picture and show that the stabilization occurs even when including only the main poloidal harmonic

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