Beat wave current drive with intense pulsed free-electron lasers

Abstract

High power free-electron lasers make possible new methods for driving current in toroidal devices with electromagnetic waves. Earlier considerations of beat wave current drive are applied to a hot magnetized plasma and an arbitrary beat wave. Here the beating of two electromagnetic waves resonantly excites a low frequency beat wave that accelerates and heats electrons and leads to a current. The absolute current drive efficiency depends nonlinearly on the two pump wave intensities and is constrained by the Manley-Rowe relations. Accessibility at high plasma densities is not a difficulty, but a degree of frequency tunability of the wave sources is required. Particle simulations indicate that there is good coupling to an electron velocity tail for a Langmuir beat wave with a phase velocity 1.5 to 3 times (Te/me)½, so that all of the high frequency wave source is absorbed and the beat wave damps completely on the electrons. A novel diagnostic, based on an analytical solution for the linearized Fokker-Planck equation describing electron scattering and slowing down, is added to the particle code. This permits the computation of the current drive efficiency, including both the non-linear beat wave coupling and the collisional relaxation of the electron distribution. A realistic scenario for a beat wave current drive experiment in the Livermore Microwave Tokamak Experiment is calculated using the TORAY toroidal ray tracing code, and the scaling to an engineering test reactor plasma is described.