Quasi Single Helicity in EXTRAP - T2R

The Reversed Field Pinch (RFP) is a magnetic configuration for the confinement of plasmas of therm onuclear interest [1]. The appeal of the RFP for fusion purposes is th at th e configuration owes its persistence in time to magnetic self-organization processes, which are responsible for the spontaneous production of a significant fraction of the confining magnetic field. This strongly reduces the need for complicated, and expensive, external coil systems and makes the plasma less prone to disruptive phenomena in comparison with tokamaks since much less free energy is available. In the last years a significant effort of the RFP community has been dedicated to the study of helical RFP states. This is based on the theoretical prediction that the RFP plasma can spontaneously access, through a self-organization process, the Single Helicity (SH) regime [2]. In this condition the dynamo needed to su stain the RFP configuration is driven by an individual m=1 saturated resistive kink and has a lam inar character. Closed magnetic flux surfaces are preserved in the SH regime. The SH state is naturally resilient to the magnetic chaos and this is therefore beneficial for plasma confinement. Given the potential benefit of a self-organized, non-chaotic RFP configuration, we have started an experimental and theoretical project, which involves several RFP devices and numerical codes. This initiative is devoted to collect and organize all the QSH evidence in a unique database to study QSH in a variety of different conditions and to control and optimize this helical regime. In this paper we report the