Surfaces with Klein bottle topology occur in fusion reactor fields

Abstract

Magnetic confinement fusion devices, such as tokamaks and stellarators, are designed such that magnetic field lines lie in magnetic surfaces that form a foliation of nested genus-1 tori. The Poincaré-Hopf index theorem implies that only surfaces with genus 1 allow for vector fields that lie tangent to the surface and are smooth and nowhere-vanishing. It is often implicitly assumed that magnetic surfaces are always toroidal. This paper we show that surfaces with the topology of an immersed Klein bottle (the only other genus-1 compact surface) can also occur in fusion reactor fields. These surfaces occur around fixed points of the Poincaré map that are reflection-hyperbolic, and are spanned by the field lines that asymptotically approach and depart from this closed line. Configurations in which this occurs appear in the stellarator database QUASR, and have been described in literature in the context of abnormal satwooth crashes.