Identification of the plasma magnetic contour from external magnetic measurements by means of equivalent currents

One of the main research issues in the thermonuclear fusion area is the identification of plasma contour starting from external magnetic measurements. Possible approaches to this inverse problem make use of equivalent currents to represent the plasma internal current density, regularizing in this way the magnetic field reconstruction. Of course, the choice of the representation basis for such equivalent currents is critical. The paper aims at analyzing the effect of the number and position of base currents on the performance of the identification algorithm. (orig.)