Confinement optimisation by plasma shaping on TCV

Any improvement in the energy confinement time of a tokamak reactor may facilitate its access to ignition. TCV has the unique capability of creating a wide variety of plasma shapes and can therefore investigate to which extent an appropriate choice of the plasma shape can improve the energy confinement time. For simple shapes defined only by their elongation and triangularity, it has already been observed on TCV that the confinement properties of the plasma depend strongly on the shape. This previous work has now been extended to include more complex shapes and higher elongations, in order firstly to test the applicability of the previously proposed explanation for the shape dependence of the confinement time and secondly to propose new shapes which offer a substantial gain on their confinement characteristics. (author) 4 figs., 1 tab., 2 refs