Diagnostics development for quasi-steady-state operation of the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator (invited)

The critical issues in the development of diagnostics, which need to work robust and reliable under quasi-steady state conditions for the discharge durations of 30 min and which cannot be maintained throughout the one week duration of each operation phase of the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator, are being discussed

Influence of plasma turbulence on microwave propagation

It is not fully understood how electromagnetic waves propagate through plasma density fluctuations when the size of the fluctuations is comparable with the wavelength of the incident radiation. In this paper, the perturbing effect of a turbulent plasma density layer on a traversing microwave beam is simulated with full-wave simulations. The deterioration of the microwave beam is calculated as a function of the characteristic turbulence structure size, the turbulence amplitude, the depth of the interaction zone and the size of the waist of the incident beam. The maximum scattering is observed for a structure size on the order of half the vacuum wavelength. The scattering and beam broadening was found to increase linearly with the depth of the turbulence layer and quadratically with the fluctuation strength. Consequences for experiments and 3D effects are considered.Comment: 16 pages, 13 figures. This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article submitted for publication in Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion. IoP Publishing Ltd is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from i

Feasibility study for a correlation electron cyclotron emission turbulence diagnostic based on nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations

This paper describes the use of nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations to assess the feasibility of a new correlation electron cyclotron emission (CECE) diagnostic that has been proposed for the Alcator C-Mod tokamak (Marmar et al 2009 Nucl. Fusion 49 104014). This work is based on a series of simulations performed with the GYRO code (Candy and Waltz 2003 J. Comput. Phys. 186 545). The simulations are used to predict ranges of fluctuation level, peak poloidal wavenumber and radial correlation length of electron temperature fluctuations in the core of the plasma. The impact of antenna pattern and poloidal viewing location on measurable turbulence characteristics is addressed using synthetic diagnostics. An upper limit on the CECE sample volume size is determined. The modeling results show that a CECE diagnostic capable of measuring transport-relevant, long-wavelength (k[subscript θ]ρ[subscript s] < 0.5) electron temperature fluctuations is feasible at Alcator C-Mod.United States. Dept. of Energy (DE-FC02-C99ER54512-CMOD