Incoherent Thomson scattering diagnostics in non-relativistic current-carrying plasmas

measurements of electron distribution functions to the case of the experimental setup proposed by Kantor [1] for the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak; these cal-culations have been used in the feasibility study by Tsalas et al. [2]. More specifically, we begin from the theory reported by Sheffield [3] for the scattered power, and we follow closely the analysis of Segre [4, 5]; then, we compute the signal to noise ratio (SNR) as in the work of Carretta et al. [6]. In our analysis, we assume that electrons are well described by the Spitzer and Härm distribution function [7]; such an assumption is common in the Thom-son scattering literature [5, 6], though it implies that trapping effects, due to the inhomogeneous magnetic field of a tokamak, as well as relativistic effects, are neglected. Moreover, strictly speaking, the use of the Spitzer-Härm electron distribution function is justified for an Ohmic current density only, i.e., a cur-rent density driven by an external electric field. A more precise analysis would require a detailed modeling of the electron distribution function, which could be obtained, e.g., by solving the Fokker-Planck equation in the drift approximation