Recent progress on ATF

The ATF experiment will test improvements to high-beta, steady-state toroidal confinement using external helical fields. The device design has been optimized to (1) provide direct access to the high-beta second-stability regime, (2) have sufficient flexibility to study a large range of toroidal configurations both with and without plasma current, (3) test the reduction of low-collisionality transport by EXB drifts induced by the self-consistent radial electric field, and (4) permit steady-state, high-beta operation without disruptions. Continued physics studied at ORNL and recent results from foreign stellarator experiments have increased confidence in ATF performance