Improvement of the magnetic configuration in the reversed field pinch through successive bifurcations

The reversed field pinch (RFP) is a magnetic configuration alternative to the tokamak that can be considered for a second generation of reactors. In this paper new remarkable results obtained in the RFP experiment RFX-mod are presented, showing that an internal transport barrier delimitates a large fraction of the plasma volume in a RFP when the current is raised to ∼1.5 MA. The formation of this transport barrier is related to a profound, spontaneous modification of the magnetic topology. Due to the occurrence of a saddle node bifurcation the plasma enters in the single helical axis state, which is theoretically known to be more resilient to chaos. This bifurcation is driven by the amplitude of the helical perturbation which dominates the mode spectrum. © 2009 American Institute of Physics.