Including the vacuum energy in stellarator coil design

Being three-dimensional, stellarators have the advantage that plasma currents are not essential for creating rotational-transform; however, the external current-carrying coils in stellarators can have strong geometrical shaping, which can complicate the construction. Reducing the inter-coil electromagnetic forces acting on strongly shaped 3D coils and the stress on the support structure, while preserving the favorable properties of the magnetic field is a design challenge. In this work, we recognize that the inter-coil \({\boldsymbol{j}} \times {\boldsymbol{B}}\) forces are the gradient of the vacuum magnetic energy, \(\displaystyle E := \frac{1}{2\mu_0}\int_{\mathbb{R}^3} \!\!\! B^2 \, dV\). We introduce an objective functional, \({\mathcal{F}}:= \Phi_2 + \omega E\), built on the usual quadratic flux on a prescribed target surface, \(\displaystyle \Phi_2 := \frac{1}{2}\int_{\mathcal{S}} ( {\boldsymbol{B}} \cdot {\boldsymbol{n}} )^2 \, dS\), and the vacuum energy, where \(\omega\) is a weight penalty. The Euler-Lagrange equation for stationary states is derived, and numerical illustrations are computed using the SIMSOPT code \cite{simsopt}.