Toroidal precession as a geometric phase
- Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton, New Jersey 08543 (United States)
Toroidal precession is commonly understood as the orbit-averaged toroidal drift of guiding centers in axisymmetric and quasisymmetric configurations. We give a new, more natural description of precession as a geometric phase effect. In particular, we show that the precession angle arises as the holonomy of a guiding center's poloidal trajectory relative to a principal connection. The fact that this description is physically appropriate is borne out with new, manifestly coordinate-independent expressions for the precession angle that apply to all types of orbits in tokamaks and quasisymmetric stellarators alike. We then describe how these expressions may be fruitfully employed in numerical calculations of precession.
- OSTI ID:
- 22113357
- Journal Information:
- Physics of Plasmas, Journal Name: Physics of Plasmas Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 20; ISSN PHPAEN; ISSN 1070-664X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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