Microinstabilities exhibit a rich variety of behavior in stellarators due to
the many degrees of freedom in the magnetic geometry. It has recently been
found that certain stellarators (quasi-isodynamic ones with maximum-J
geometry) are partly resilient to trapped-particle instabilities, because
fast-bouncing particles tend to extract energy from these modes near marginal
stability. In reality, stellarators are never perfectly quasi-isodynamic, and
the question thus arises whether they still benefit from enhanced stability.
Here the stability properties of Wendelstein 7-X and a more quasi-isodynamic
configuration, QIPC, are investigated numerically and compared with the
National Compact Stellarator Experiment (NCSX) and the DIII-D tokamak. In
gyrokinetic simulations, performed with the gyrokinetic code GENE in the
electrostatic and collisionless approximation, ion-temperature-gradient modes,
trapped-electron modes and mixed-type instabilities are studied. Wendelstein
7-X and QIPC exhibit significantly reduced growth rates for all simulations
that include kinetic electrons, and the latter are indeed found to be
stabilizing in the energy budget. These results suggest that imperfectly
optimized stellarators can retain most of the stabilizing properties predicted
for perfect maximum-J configurations.Comment: 15 pages, 40 figure
