Effective temperatures, sawtooth mixing, and stochastic diffusion ripple loss of fast H+ minority ions driven by ion cyclotron heating in the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor

Abstract

This paper presents studies of the H+ minority ions driven by Ion Cyclotron Radio Frequency (ICRF) heating in the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) [R. J. Hawryluk et al., Phys. Plasmas 5, 1577 (1998)] deuterium plasmas using primarily passive H° flux detection in the energy range of 0.2–1.0 MeV. The measured passive H+ energy spectra are compared with active (Li pellet charge exchange) results. It is shown that in the passive mode the main donors for the neutralization of H+ ions in this energy range are C5+ ions. The measured effective H+ tail temperatures range from 0.15 MeV at an ICRF power of 2 MW to 0.35 MeV at 6 MW. Radial redistribution of ICRF-driven H+ ions was detected when giant sawtooth crashes occurred during the ICRF heating. The redistribution affected ions with energy below 0.7–0.8 MeV. The sawtooth crashes displaces H+ ions outward along the plasma major radius into the stochastic ripple diffusion domain where those ions are lost in ∼10 msec. These observations are consistent with the model of the redistribution of energetic particles developed previously to explain the results of deuterium-tritium (DT) alpha-particle redistribution due to sawtooth oscillations observed in TFTR. The experimental data are also consistent with numerical simulations of H+ stochastic ripple diffusion losses.