Planet Packing Revisited

Ross Eckler discusses a problem in his article Planet Packing in the May 2001 Word Ways: given a list of words, such as the names of the planets, how efficiently can they be packed into a single string of characters so that each word on the list can be read off left to right (but not necessarily contiguously)? He hypothesizes there is no guarantee that any algorithm will end up with a minimum string. Since the design and analysis of algorithms has been my area of research for some 25 years, this caught my attention. Informally, an algorithm is a terminating procedure that could be coded as a computer program. (However, the procedure in the Planet Packing article does not contain enough tie-breaking rules to qualify as an algorithm)

Confirmation of the topology of the Wendelstein 7-X magnetic field to better than 1:100,000

Fusion energy research has in the past 40 years focused primarily on the tokamak concept, but recent advances in plasma theory and computational power have led to renewed interest in stellarators. The largest and most sophisticated stellarator in the world, Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X), has just started operation, with the aim to show that the earlier weaknesses of this concept have been addressed successfully, and that the intrinsic advantages of the concept persist, also at plasma parameters approaching those of a future fusion power plant. Here we show the first physics results, obtained before plasma operation: that the carefully tailored topology of nested magnetic surfaces needed for good confinement is realized, and that the measured deviations are smaller than one part in 100,000. This is a significant step forward in stellarator research, since it shows that the complicated and delicate magnetic topology can be created and verified with the required accuracy.EURATOM 633053U.S. Department of Energy DE-AC02-09CH1146

Overview over the neutral gas pressures in Wendelstein 7-X during divertor operation under boronized wall conditions

During the first test divertor campaign of the stellarator experiment Wendelstein 7-X (Pedersen et al 2022 Nucl. Fusion 62 042022), OP1.2b, 13 neutral gas pressure gauges collected data in different locations in the plasma vessel, enabling a detailed analysis of the neutral gas pressures, the compression ratios and the particle exhaust rates via the turbomolecular pumps in the different magnetic field configurations. In Wendelstein 7-X, the edge magnetic islands are intersected by the divertor target plates and used to create a plasma-wall interface. As the number and position of the magnetic islands varies in different magnetic field configurations, the position of the strike line on the target plates and thus the neutral gas pressure in the subdivertor differs between the configurations. Neutral gas pressures on the order of few 10−4 mbar were measured in the subdivertor region. The highest neutral gas pressure of $1.75\times 10^{-3}$ mbar was obtained in the so-called high iota configuration featuring four edge magnetic islands per cross section. The neutral particle flux through the pumping gaps into the subdivertor volume was provided by EMC3-EIRENE simulations and allowed to analyze the relation between the particle flux entering the subdivertor and the pressure distribution in the subdivertor. Finite element simulations in ANSYS provide a detailed picture of the pressure distribution in the subdivertor volume and agree with the neutral gas pressure measurements in the subdivertor in the standard configuration featuring an island chain of 5 edge magnetic islands. Surprisingly high neutral gas pressures that were not predicted by the simulation were measured in the subdivertor region away from the main strike line for discharges in the most used magnetic configuration, the standard configuration. While the pressure ratio between the two sections of the subdivertor volume, the low and high iota section is 0.06 in high iota configuration, a ratio of 2–5 was obtained in the other configurations, indicating significant particle loads and exhaust rates on the high iota section of the subdivertor in magnetic configurations with the main strike line on the low iota divertor targets