D. C. Mcdonald R. A. Cairns C. N. Lashmore-Davies G. Le Clair
Detailed ray tracing, of wave propagation in a plasma near electron cyclotron resonances, suggests that refraction can lead to reduced absorption, in some cases. By studying the full wave equation for the ordinary wave near the fundamental, in a slab model, it is shown that such refraction does indeed reduce absorption, for this particular case, bu…
PublishedA. Thyagaraja
This paper and a forthcoming one develop the spectral theory of ballooning transformations relevant to tokamak physics from rst principles in a rigorous and yet intuitively clear manner. The power of the ballooning representation to throw light on the spectral characteristics of the plasma problems to which it is applicable is emphasized, and examp…
PublishedParag Vyas Denis Mustafa A. William Morris
Theoretical and experimental work on the vertical position control system on the COMPASS-D tokamak is described. An analog proportional 1 derivative (P 1 D) system is currently used, and two important sources of disturbance are observed in the system. One source is 600-Hz noise from thyristor power supplies, and the other is impulselike disturbance…
PublishedP. Helander
In a toroidally rotating tokamak plasma, heavy impurity ions accumulate on the outside of each flux surface under the action of the centrifugal force. The collision frequency therefore varies over the flux surface. This circumstance is shown to enhance the neoclassical transport processes, including the bootstrap current, by making collisions occur…
PublishedD. A. Gates R. Akers L. Appel P. G. Carolan N. Conway et al.
The Small Tight Aspect Ratio Tokamak (START) [A. Sykes et al., Nucl. Fusion 32, 769 (1994)] spherical tokamak has recently achieved the record value of toroidal beta~30% in a tokamak-like configuration. The improvements that have made these results possible are presented along with a description of the global equilibrium parameters of the discharge…
PublishedC. N. Lashmore-Davies V. Fuchs R. A. Cairns
A theory of fast wave absorption in a high-beta plasma is given. A reduced, second-order, ordinary differential equation has been used which includes all collisionless electron dissipation mechanisms and ion cyclotron damping over many harmonics. This is relevant to the high-harmonic fast wave heating scheme proposed by Ono [Phys. Plasmas 2, 4075 (…
PublishedJ. W. Connor R. J. Hastie H. R. Wilson R. L. Miller
A new formalism for analyzing the magnetohydrodynamic stability of a limiter tokamak edge plasma is developed. Two radially localized, high toroidal mode number n instabilities are studied in detail: a peeling mode and an edge ballooning mode. The peeling mode, driven by edge current density and stabilized by edge pressure gradient, has features wh…
PublishedN. C. Hawkes B. C. Stratton T. Tala C. D. Challis G. Conway R. Deangelis C. Giroud J. Hobirk E. Joffrin P. Lomas P. Lotte J. Mailloux D. Mazon E. Rachlew S. Reyes-Cortes E. Solano K-D. Zastrow
Modern charge-coupled-device (CCD) detectors can achieve peak quantum efficiencies of 90%, compared with less than 10% for the photocathode of an electron multiplier. We report on laboratory tests of examples of these two detector technologies to evaluate their relative performance for precision Doppler spectroscopy of laboratory plasmas. The tests…
PublishedO. Sauter R. J. La Haye Z. Chang D. A. Gates Y. Kamada et al.
The maximum normalized beta achieved in long-pulse tokamak discharges at low collisionality falls significantly below both that observed in short pulse discharges and that predicted by the ideal MHD theory. Recent long-pulse experiments, in particular those simulating the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) [M. Rosenbluth et al.…
Published