Properties of the Biot-Savart operator acting on surface currents

Abstract

We investigate properties of the image and kernel of the Biot-Savart operator in the context of stellarator designs for plasma fusion. We first show that for any given coil winding surface (CWS) the image of the Biot-Savart operator is $L^2$-dense in the space of square-integrable harmonic fields defined on a plasma domain surrounded by the CWS. Then we show that harmonic fields which are harmonic in a proper neighbourhood of the underlying plasma domain can in fact be approximated in any $C^k$-norm by elements of the image of the Biot-Savart operator. In the second part of this work we establish an explicit isomorphism between the space of harmonic Neumann fields and the kernel of the Biot-Savart operator which in particular implies that the dimension of the kernel of the Biot-Savart operator coincides with the genus of the coil winding surface and hence turns out to be a homotopy invariant among regular domains in $3$-space. Lastly, we provide an iterative scheme which we show converges weakly in $W^{-\frac{1}{2},2}$-topology to elements of the kernel of the Biot-Savart operator.