Edge plasma control by a local island divertor in the Compact Helical System

Abstract

A local island divertor (LID) experiment was performed on the Compact Helical System (CHS) to demonstrate the principle of the LID. It was clearly demonstrated that the particle flow is controlled by adding a resonant perturbation field to the CHS magnetic configuration, and is guided to the back of an m/n = 1/1 island which is created by the perturbation field. The particles recycled there were pumped out with a pumping rate in the range from a few percent to about 10%. As a result, the line averaged core density was reduced by a factor of about 2 in comparison with non-LID discharges at the same gas puffing rate. In addition to the demonstration of these fundamental divertor functions, a modest improvement of energy confinement was observed, which could be attributed to the edge plasma control by the LID.