A. Köhn

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.

Cross-polarization scattering of diffracting electron-cyclotron beams in a turbulent plasma with the WKBeam code

In turbulent plasmas, density fluctuations are expected to scatter radiofrequency wave beams, causing a degradation of the beam quality and thus reducing their performance. The WKBeam code is a Monte-Carlo solver for the wave kinetic equation, which describes such an effect, so far limited to a single wave mode so that it cannot account for cross-polarization scattering. In this work a new feature of the WKBeam code is presented, which allows the analysis of cross-polarization scattering of electron-cyclotron (EC) wave beams in realistic tokamak scenarios. We prove the convergence of the numerical scheme and give a preliminary overview of such effects in ITER scenarios.

Kinetic simulations of X-B and O-X-B mode conversion

We have performed fully-kinetic simulations of X-B and O-X-B mode conversion in one and two dimensional setups using the PIC code EPOCH. We have recovered the linear dispersion relation for electron Bernstein waves by employing relatively low amplitude incoming waves. The setups presented here can be used to study non-linear regimes of X-B and O-X-B mode conversion.

Microwave beam broadening due to turbulent plasma density fluctuations within the limit of the Born approximation and beyond

Plasma turbulence, and edge density fluctuations in particular, can under certain conditions broaden the cross-section of injected microwave beams significantly. This can be a severe problem for applications relying on well-localized deposition of the microwave power, like the control of MHD instabilities. Here we investigate this broadening mechanism as a function of fluctuation level, background density and propagation length in a fusion-relevant scenario using two numerical codes, the full-wave code IPF-FDMC and the novel wave kinetic equation solver WKBeam. The latter treats the effects of fluctuations using a statistical approach, based on an iterative solution of the scattering problem (Born approximation). The full-wave simulations are used to benchmark this approach. The Born approximation is shown to be valid over a large parameter range, including ITER-relevant scenarios.

Overdense microwave plasma heating in the CNT stellarator

Overdense plasmas have been attained with 2.45 GHz microwave heating in the low-field, low-aspect-ratio CNT stellarator. Densities higher than four times the ordinary (O) mode cutoff density were measured with 8 kW of power injected in the O-mode and, alternatively, with 6.5 kW in the extraordinary (X) mode. The temperature profiles peak at the plasma edge. This was ascribed to collisional damping of the X-mode at the upper hybrid resonant layer. The X-mode reaches that location by tunneling, mode-conversions or after polarization-scrambling reflections off the wall and in-vessel coils, regardless of the initial launch being in O- or X-mode. This interpretation was confirmed by full-wave numerical simulations. Also, as the CNT plasma is not completely ionized at these low microwave power levels, electron density was shown to increase with power. A dependence on magnetic field strength was also observed, for O-mode launch.

Kinetic simulations of X-B and O-X-B mode conversion and its deterioration at high input power

Author(s): Arefiev, AV; Dodin, IY; Koehn, A; Du Toit, EJ; Holzhauer, E; Shevchenko, VF; Vann, RGL | Abstract: Spherical tokamak plasmas are typically overdense and thus inaccessible to externally-injected microwaves in the electron cyclotron range. The electrostatic electron Bernstein wave (EBW), however, provides a method to access the plasma core for heating and diagnostic purposes. Understanding the details of the coupling process to electromagnetic waves is thus important both for the interpretation of microwave diagnostic data and for assessing the feasibility of EBW heating and current drive. While the coupling is reasonably well-understood in the linear regime, nonlinear physics arising from high input power has not been previously quantified. To tackle this problem, we have performed one- and two-dimensional fully kinetic particle-in-cell simulations of the two possible coupling mechanisms, namely X-B and O-X-B mode conversion. We find that the ion dynamics has a profound effect on the field structure in the nonlinear regime, as high amplitude short-scale oscillations of the longitudinal electric field are excited in the region below the high-density cut-off prior to the arrival of the EBW. We identify this effect as the instability of the X wave with respect to resonant scattering into an EBW and a lower-hybrid wave. We calculate the instability rate analytically and find this basic theory to be in reasonable agreement with our simulation results.

Full‐wave modeling of the O‐X mode conversion in the Pegasus Toroidal Experiment

The potential of an EBW heating scheme via the O—X—B mode conversion scenarios has been investigated for the PEGASUS toroidal experiment. With the 2D full‐wave code IPF‐FDMC the O—X conversion has been modeled as a function of the poloidal and toroidal injection angles for a microwave frequency of 2.45 GHz. Based on preliminary Langmuir probe measurements in the mode conversion layer, different density profiles have been also included in the simulations. A maximum mode conversion efficiency of approximately 80 % has been found, making EBW heating an attractive heating scheme for PEGASUS.