A quiescent plasma is sustained for 80 energy confinement times by only gas fuelling and neutral beam heating in an axisymmetric region of the Tandem Mirror Experiment Upgrade (TMX-U). This plasma should be unstable because of the bad magnetic curvature and the absence of ion cyclotron heating which previously provided ponderomotive stabilization to sustain plasmas in bad-curvature regions of other axisymmetric mirror experiments. The TMX-U data are consistent with stabilization by a symbiosis between two mechanisms – line tying, which reduces the growth rate, and finite Larmor radius edge stabilization, which can result in quiescent operation.
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Molvik et al. (1990) studied this question.
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