Analysis of Recurrent Patterns in Toroidal Magnetic Fields...

In the development of magnetic confinement fusion which will be a future source for low cost power, physicists must be able to analyze the magnetic field that confines the burning plasma. While the magnetic field can be described as a series of vectors, traditional techniques for analyzing the field’s topology can not be used because of its homoclinic nature. In this paper we describe a technique developed as a collaboration between physicists and computer scientists that determines the topology of a toroidal magnetic field using fieldlines with near minimal lengths. More specifically, we analyze the Poincare ́ map of the sampled fieldlines in a Poincare ́ section including identifying critical points and other topological features of interest to physicists. The technique has been deployed into an interactive parallel visualization tool which physicists are using to gain new insight into simulations of magnetically confined buring plasmas.