An area-preserving mapping in natural canonical coordinates for magnetic field line trajectories in the DIII-D tokamak

The new approach of integrating magnetic field line trajectories in natural canonical coordinates (Punjabi and Ali 2008 Phys. Plasmas15 122502) in divertor tokamaks is used for the DIII-D tokamak (Luxon and Davis1985 Fusion Technol.8 441). The equilibrium EFIT data (Evans et al 2004 Phys. Rev. Lett.92 235003, Lao et al 2005 Fusion Sci. Technol.48 968) for the DIII-D tokamak shot 115467 at 3000 ms is used to construct the equilibrium generating function (EGF) for the DIII-D in natural canonical coordinates. The EGF gives quite an accurate representation of the closed and open equilibrium magnetic surfaces near the separatrix, the separatrix, the position of the X-point and the poloidal magnetic flux inside the ideal separatrix in the DIII-D. The equilibrium safety factor q from the EGF is somewhat smaller than the DIII-D EFIT q profile. The equilibrium safety factor is calculated from EGF as described in the previous paper (Punjabi and Ali 2008 Phys. Plasmas15 122502). Here the safety factor for the open surfaces in the DIII-D is calculated. A canonical transformation is used to construct a symplectic mapping for magnetic field line trajectories in the DIII-D in natural canonical coordinates. The map is explored in more detail in this work, and is used to calculate field line trajectories in the DIII-D tokamak. The continuous analogue of the map does not distort the DIII-D magnetic surfaces in different toroidal planes between successive iterations of the map. The map parameter k can represent effects of magnetic asymmetries in the DIII-D. These effects in the DIII-D are illustrated. The DIII-D map is then used to calculate stochastic broadening of the ideal separatrix from the topological noise and field errors, the low mn, the high mn and peeling–ballooning magnetic perturbations in the DIII-D. The width of the stochastic layer scales as 1/2 power of amplitude with a maximum deviation of 6% from the Boozer–Rechester scaling (Boozer and Rechester 1978 Phys. Fluids21 682). The loss of poloidal flux scales linearly with the amplitude of perturbation with a maximum deviation of 10% from linearity. Perturbations with higher mode numbers result in higher stochasticity. The higher the complexity and coupling in the equilibrium magnetic geometry, the closer is the scaling to the Boozer–Rechester scaling of width. The comparison of the EGF for the simple map (Punjabi et al 1992 Phys. Rev. Lett.69 3322) with that of the DIII-D shows that the more complex the magnetic geometry and the more coupling of modes in equilibrium, the more robust or resilient is the system against the chaos-inducing, symmetry-breaking perturbations.