Equilibrium and stability code for a diffuse plasma.

A computer code to investigate the equilibrium and stability of a diffuse plasma in three dimensions is described that generalizes earlier work on a sharp free boundary model. Toroidal equilibria of a plasma are determined by considering paths of steepest descent associated with a new version of the variational principle of magnetohydrodynamics that involves mapping a fixed coordinate domain onto the plasma. A discrete approximation of the potential energy is written down following the finite element method, and the resulting expression is minimized with respect to the values of the mapping at points of a rectangular grid. If a relative minimum of the discrete analogue of the energy is attained, the corresponding equilibrium is considered to be stable.