Jan Egedal

Fast ion millimeter wave collective Thomson scattering diagnostics on TEXTOR and ASDEX upgrades

Collective Thomson scattering (CTS) diagnostic systems for measuring fast ions in TEXTOR and ASDEX Upgrade are described in this article. Both systems use millimeter waves generated by gyrotrons as probing radiation and the scattered radiation is detected with heterodyne receivers having 40 spectral channels at TEXTOR and 50 spectral channels at ASDEX Upgrade. The antenna patterns of probe and receiver, both steerable, determine size and location of the measuring volume, and the direction of the resolved fast ion velocity. With overmoded transmission lines, consisting of waveguides and quasioptical mirrors, the antenna patterns depend on the alignment of the entire transmission line. Alignment is aided by visible laser beams relayed by small optical mirrors, inserted in the quasioptical mirrors.

First results of collective scattering on JET (invited)

The fast ion and α-particle diagnostic at JET is based on collective Thomson scattering of high power millimeter-wave radiation. The principal aim of the diagnostic will be the measurement of the spatially resolved velocity distribution of fast α particles when tritium is introduced in JET plasmas, although several other applications are foreseen. The diagnostic uses a 140 GHz, 500 kW, gyrotron as the source of probing radiation and a heterodyne detection system. The diagnostic came into operation during the last JET operational campaign. First measurements were made of the thermal and mildly suprathermal (induced by ion cyclotron resonance heating) ion feature. The results confirmed expectations, indicating that the diagnostic should give the predicted performance for observation of α-particle populations in the DT phase. The signal-to-noise ratio is limited by the noise on the background radiation (electron cyclotron emission), which has a minimum around 140 GHz only when JET is operated at B∼3.4 T. To ...

Fast ion dynamics measured by collective Thomson scattering

Magnetically confined fusion plasmas contain highly non-thermal populations of fast ions resulting from fusion reactions and plasma heating. With energies in the MeV range, two to three orders of magnitude above the bulk ion and electron energies, the fast ions typically carry 1/3 of the plasma kinetic energy and even more of the free energy. It is essential that these energetic ions remain confined while they slow down and heat the thermal bulk plasma.

LINEWIDTH MEASUREMENTS OF THE JET ENERGETIC ION AND ALPHA PARTICLE COLLECTIVE THOMSON SCATTERING DIAGNOSTIC GYROTRON

Spectral purity of the transmitter source of a collective Thomson scattering (CTS) system is vitally important to insure that measured signals only originate from the plasma and not from stray source light. A number of high power (up to 500 kW), 140 GHz gyrotron tubes used with the Joint European Torus (JET) CTS system have been found to have one or more spurious modes and many harmonics in the output spectrum. The CTS diagnostic receiver system was used to make measurements of the gyrotron spectrum. It was comprised of a homodyne part from MIT for frequency sidebands <500 MHz, and a heterodyne part constructed at JET for frequency sidebands from 0.1 to 6 GHz. One tube at high power produced a strong 25 MHz mode and its harmonics to large frequency offsets, unsuitable for CTS measurements. Only at reduced power of approximately 100 kW was this tube’s spectrum sufficiently clean for CTS. Another tube at JET operated at 500 kW output power with only low level parasitic modes, indicating that higher power gy...

Calibration of the Joint European Torus energetic ion and alpha particle collective Thomson scattering diagnostic receiver

The receiver of the Joint European Torus (JET) energetic ion and alpha particle collective Thomson scattering diagnostic is calibrated assuming blackbody emission from the torus vacuum vessel (VV) and using electron cyclotron emission (ECE). The 32 receiver channels are absolutely calibrated with a mechanical chopper in the quasioptical arm of the receiver, alternating the receiver view between the torus vacuum at 320 °C and room temperature. This calibration is noisy due to the small difference between torus and room temperatures. A more accurate relative calibration is achieved with the ECE during plasma shots. The intensity of the ECE is found to be a smooth function of frequency, which enables the combination of the ECE calibration with the VV calibration. The accuracy of the absolute VV calibration is hereby improved to nearly the same standard as the relative ECE calibration. ECE signals measured by the calibrated receiver agree well with standard JET ECE diagnostics. Based on mathematical considera...