Necessary and sufficient conditions for quasisymmetry

A necessary and sufficient set of conditions for a quasisymmetric magnetic field in the form of constraint equations is derived from first principles. Without any assumption regarding the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equilibrium of the plasma, conditions for quasisymmetry are constructed starting from the single-particle Lagrangian to the leading order. The conditions presented in the paper are less restrictive than the set recently obtained by Burby et al. [“Some mathematics for quasi-symmetry,” arXiv:1912.06468 (2019)], and could facilitate ongoing efforts toward investigating the existence of global quasisymmetric MHD equilibria. It is also shown that quasisymmetry implies the existence of flux surfaces, regardless of whether the field corresponds to an MHD equilibrium.