A stellarator is a device used to confine a hot plasma with magnetic fields in order to sustain a controlled nuclear fusion reaction. It is one of the earliest controlled fusion devices, first invented by Lyman Spitzer in 1950 and built the next year at what would later become the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The name refers to the possibility of harnessing the power source of the sun, a stellar object.

Stellarators were popular in the 1950s and 60s, but the much better results from tokamak designs led to them falling from favor in the 1970s. More recently, in the 1990s, problems with the tokamak concept has led to renewed interest in the stellarator design, and a number of new devices have been built. Some important modern stellarator experiments are Wendelstein, in Germany, and the Large Helical Device, in Japan. Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory started building a new stellarator, NCSX, but as of 2008, work was abandoned [1] due to high costs.

Contents

• 1 Description
• 2 Configurations of stellarator
• 3 Comparison to tokamaks
• 4 Recent results
• 5 References
• 6 External links