Abstract
A comprehensive treatment of the models used in ray- and beam-tracing codes to calculate the electron cyclotron current drive (ECCD) by means of the adjoint technique, based on the adjoint properties of the collision and Vlasov operators appearing in the drift-kinetic equation, is presented. Particular attention is focused on carefully solving the adjoint drift-kinetic equation (generalized Spitzer problem) with parallel momentum conservation in the like-particle collisions. The formulation of the problem is valid for an arbitrary magnetic configuration. Only the limit of low collisionality is considered here, which is of relevance for high-temperature plasmas. It is shown that the accurate solution of the adjoint drift-kinetic equation with parallel momentum conservation significantly differs (apart from the suprathermal electron portion) from that calculated in the high-speed-limit, which is most commonly used in the literature. For high-temperature plasmas with significant relativistic effects, the accuracy of the resulting numerical models is demonstrated by ray-tracing calculations and benchmark results are presented. It is found that the ECCD efficiency calculated for ITER with parallel momentum conservation significantly exceeds the predictions obtained with the high-speed-limit model.
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