Marginal Stability Studies of Microturbulence Near ITB Onset on Alcator C-Mod

Insight into microturbulence and transport in tokamak plasmas is being sought using linear simulations of drift waves near the onset time of an internal transport barrier (ITB) on Alcator C-Mod. Microturbulence is likely generated by instabilities of drift waves and causes transport of heat and particles. This transport is studied because the containment of heat and particles is important for the achievement of practical nuclear fusion. We investigate nearness to marginal stability of ion temperature gradient (ITG) modes for conditions in the ITB region at the trigger time for ITB formation. Data from C-Mod, analyzed by TRANSP (a time dependent transport analysis code), is read by the code TRXPL and made into input files for the parallel gyrokinetic model code GS2. Temperature and density gradients in these input files are modified to produce new input files. Results from these simulations show a weak ITG instability in the barrier region at the time of onset, above marginal stability; the normalized critical temperature gradient is 80% of the experimental temperature gradient. The growth rate increases linearly above the critical value, with the spectrum of ITG modes remaining parabolic up to a multiplicative factor of 2. The effect of varying density gradients is found to be much weaker and causes the fastest growing drift mode to change from ITG to trapped electron mode character. Simulations were carried out on the NERSC IBM 6000 SP using 4 nodes, 16 processors per node. Predictive simulations were examined for converged instability after 10,000-50,000 timesteps in each case. Each simulation took approximately 30 minutes to complete on the IBM SP

Evidence Against Instanton Dominance of Topological Charge Fluctuations in QCD

The low-lying eigenmodes of the Dirac operator associated with typical gauge field configurations in QCD encode, among other low-energy properties, the physics behind the solution to the $U_A(1)$ problem (i.e. the origin of the $\eta'$ mass), the nature of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, and the physics of string-breaking, quark-antiquark pair production, and the OZI rule. Moreover, the space-time chiral structure of these eigenmodes reflects the space-time topological structure of the underlying gauge field. We present evidence from lattice QCD on the local chiral structure of low Dirac eigenmodes leading to the conclusion that topological charge fluctuations of the QCD vacuum are not instanton-dominated. The result supports Witten's arguments that topological charge is produced by confinement-related gauge fluctuations rather than instantons.Comment: 35 pages, 11 figure

Velocity-space sensitivity of the time-of-flight neutron spectrometer at JET

The velocity-space sensitivities of fast-ion diagnostics are often described by so-called weight functions. Recently, we formulated weight functions showing the velocity-space sensitivity of the often dominant beam-target part of neutron energy spectra. These weight functions for neutron emission spectrometry (NES) are independent of the particular NES diagnostic. Here we apply these NES weight functions to the time-of-flight spectrometer TOFOR at JET. By taking the instrumental response function of TOFOR into account, we calculate time-of-flight NES weight functions that enable us to directly determine the velocity-space sensitivity of a given part of a measured time-of-flight spectrum from TOFOR

Relationship of edge localized mode burst times with divertor flux loop signal phase in JET

A phase relationship is identified between sequential edge localized modes (ELMs) occurrence times in a set of H-mode tokamak plasmas to the voltage measured in full flux azimuthal loops in the divertor region. We focus on plasmas in the Joint European Torus where a steady H-mode is sustained over several seconds, during which ELMs are observed in the Be II emission at the divertor. The ELMs analysed arise from intrinsic ELMing, in that there is no deliberate intent to control the ELMing process by external means. We use ELM timings derived from the Be II signal to perform direct time domain analysis of the full flux loop VLD2 and VLD3 signals, which provide a high cadence global measurement proportional to the voltage induced by changes in poloidal magnetic flux. Specifically, we examine how the time interval between pairs of successive ELMs is linked to the time-evolving phase of the full flux loop signals. Each ELM produces a clear early pulse in the full flux loop signals, whose peak time is used to condition our analysis. The arrival time of the following ELM, relative to this pulse, is found to fall into one of two categories: (i) prompt ELMs, which are directly paced by the initial response seen in the flux loop signals; and (ii) all other ELMs, which occur after the initial response of the full flux loop signals has decayed in amplitude. The times at which ELMs in category (ii) occur, relative to the first ELM of the pair, are clustered at times when the instantaneous phase of the full flux loop signal is close to its value at the time of the first ELM