MHD equilibrium properties of tokamak fusion reactor designs

The equilibrium properties of several Tokamak Reactor Designs are analyzed and compared for varying pressure and current profiles using the Princeton Equilibrium Code. It is found that the UWMAK configuration has a broader range of equilibria than the Princeton Reference Design configuration, but that the safety factor on axis is less than unity for peaked current distributions. The Argonne Experimental Power Reactor has a satisfactory range of equilibria, but a means of limiting or diverting the plasma has not yet been proposed, and this may substantially change the results obtained. (auth

The Scientific Foundations of Forecasting Magnetospheric Space Weather

The magnetosphere is the lens through which solar space weather phenomena are focused and directed towards the Earth. In particular, the non-linear interaction of the solar wind with the Earth's magnetic field leads to the formation of highly inhomogenous electrical currents in the ionosphere which can ultimately result in damage to and problems with the operation of power distribution networks. Since electric power is the fundamental cornerstone of modern life, the interruption of power is the primary pathway by which space weather has impact on human activity and technology. Consequently, in the context of space weather, it is the ability to predict geomagnetic activity that is of key importance. This is usually stated in terms of geomagnetic storms, but we argue that in fact it is the substorm phenomenon which contains the crucial physics, and therefore prediction of substorm occurrence, severity and duration, either within the context of a longer-lasting geomagnetic storm, but potentially also as an isolated event, is of critical importance. Here we review the physics of the magnetosphere in the frame of space weather forecasting, focusing on recent results, current understanding, and an assessment of probable future developments.Peer reviewe

Optimization of modular coils for stellarator fields

Introduction of a non-sinusoidal deformation can enhance the efficacy of modular coils for generating magnetic fields with a built-in rotational transform. Techniques are developed that provide an understanding of how specific deformations affect the harmonic content of the magnetic field and thus the properties of the vacuum configuration. This provides an optimization procedure for coil design

Goal-Driven Collaborative Filtering – A Directional Error Based Approach

Abstract. Collaborative filtering is one of the most effective techniques for making personalized content recommendation. In the literature, a common experimental setup in the modeling phase is to minimize, either explicitly or implicitly, the (expected) error between the predicted ratings and the true user ratings, while in the evaluation phase, the resulting model is again assessed by that error. In this paper, we argue that defining an error function that is fixed across rating scales is however limited, and different applications may have different recommendation goals thus error functions. For example, in some cases, we might be more concerned about the highly predicted items than the ones with low ratings (precision minded), while in other cases, we want to make sure not to miss any highly rated items (recall minded). Additionally, some applications might require to produce a top-N recommendation list, where the rank-based performance measure becomes valid. To address this issue, we propose a flexible optimization framework that can adapt to individual recommendation goals. We introduce a Directional Error Function to capture the cost (risk) of each individual predictions, and it can be learned from the specified performance measures at hand. Our preliminary experiments on a real data set demonstrate that significant performance gains have been achieved.