The structure of magnetic field lines in a tokamak with reversed magnetic shear is investigated by means of analytically derived area-preserving non-twist Poincaré maps. The basic configuration is the magnetic field produced by an ergodic limiter, superimposed to the tokamak equilibrium field in suitable coordinates. We consider the cases of one and two resonant modes, focusing on magnetic island dimerization and the formation of a transport barrier in the chaotic layer of field lines.

Chaotic magnetic field lines play an important role in plasma confinement by tokamaks. They can either be generated in the plasma as a result of natural instabilities or artifficially produced by external conductors, like resonant helical windings and ergodic magnetic limiters. This is a review of works carried out at the Universidade de São Paulo and Universidade Federal do Paraná on theoretical and experimental aspects of generation and control of chaotic magnetic field lines in tokamaks.

This paper presents a study on the dynamics of the rattling problem in gearboxes under non-ideal excitation. The subject has being analyzed by a number of authors such as Karagiannis and Pfeiffer (1991), for the ideal excitation case. An interesting model of the same problem by Moon (1992) has been recently used by Souza and Caldas (1999) to detect chaotic behavior. We consider two spur gears with different diameters and gaps between the teeth. Suppose the motion of one gear to be given while the motion of the other is governed by its dynamics. In the ideal case, the driving wheel is supposed to undergo a sinusoidal motion with given constant amplitude and frequency. In this paper, we consider the motion to be a function of the system response and a limited energy source is adopted. Thus an extra degree of freedom is introduced in the problem. The equations of motion are obtained via a Lagrangian approach with some assumed characteristic torque curves. Next, extensive numerical integration is used to detect some interesting geometrical aspects of regular and irregular motions of the system response.

A specially designed probe system was constructed and installed at the TBR tokamak to investigate the relation between plasma transport and plasma turbulence. The experimental data confirm the influence of temperature fluctuations in the amplitude and correlation of density and potential fluctuations, and consequently on transport parameters.