Heating single ion species plasmas with ICRF is a challenging task: Fundamental ion cyclotron heating (w = w ci ) suffers from the adverse polarization of the RF electric fields near the majority cyclotron resonance while second harmonic heating (w = 2w ci ) typically requires pre-heating of the plasma ions to become efficient. Recently, w = 2w ci …
The constructive interference effect described by Fuchs et al. [1] shows that the mode conversion and thereby the overall heating efficiency can be enhanced significantly when an integer number of fast wave wavelengths can be folded in between the high field side fast wave cutoff and the ion-ion hybrid layer(s) at which the ion Bernstein or ion cyc…
