The basics of spherical tokamaks and progress in European research

When the aspect ratio of a tokamak (A = R/a) decreases significantly, there is a transformation of the well studied tokamak toroidal magnetic configuration into the spherical tokamak (ST) configuration. This configuration has high natural plasma elongation and triangularity and other unique equilibrium and stability properties of ST configuration, which are discussed in this paper. European research into ST physics is well advanced in spite of the young age of this branch of fusion science. An overview of selected experimental and theoretical results obtained at Ioffe, Culham and Frascati is given with the emphasis on their complementarity and links to the main stream of tokamak research, such as ITER. An outline of the basic ST advantages and the potential of ST research for new insights into magnetic confinement is also given. More detailed descriptions of recent advances in ST theory and experiment may be found in the invited papers by Akers and Ono in the proceedings of this conference