Surfaces with Klein bottle topology occur in fusion reactor fields

TL;DR

This paper reveals that Klein bottle topology surfaces can occur in magnetic fields of fusion reactors, expanding the understanding beyond the commonly assumed toroidal surfaces, with implications for stellarator configurations.

Contribution

It demonstrates the existence of Klein bottle topology magnetic surfaces in fusion devices, previously thought impossible due to topological constraints.

Findings

Klein bottle surfaces occur around reflection-hyperbolic fixed points.

Such surfaces are present in the stellarator database QUASR.

These surfaces are associated with specific fixed points of the Poincaré map.

Abstract

Magnetic confinement fusion devices, such as tokamaks and stellarators, are designed such that magnetic field lines lie in magnetic surfaces that form a foliation of nested genus-1 tori. The Poincar\'e-Hopf index theorem implies that only surfaces with genus 1 allow for vector fields that lie tangent to the surface and are smooth and nowhere-vanishing. It is often implicitly assumed that magnetic surfaces are always toroidal. This paper we show that surfaces with the topology of an immersed Klein bottle (the only other genus-1 compact surface) can also occur in fusion reactor fields. These surfaces occur around fixed points of the Poincar\'e map that are reflection-hyperbolic, and are spanned by the field lines that asymptotically approach and depart from this closed line. Configurations in which this occurs appear in the stellarator database QUASR, and have been described in literature in the context of abnormal satwooth crashes.