Evaluation of emission contributions from charge-exchange between the excited states of deuterium with He+ during diagnostic of thermal helium gas beam injection and laser-induced fluorescence

Abstract

Emission contributions from charge-exchange of excited deuterium (n = 2, 3) with He+ are evaluated in a 1-D kinetic collisional radiative model in order to analyze their effects on the Thermal Helium Beam (THB) line-ratio diagnostic on ASDEX Upgrade and Laser Induced Fluorescence (LIF) He I density measurements in ITER. Recent charge-exchange calculations show that cross sections from excited deuterium (n = 2, 3) with He+ are over 4-orders of magnitude higher than those from the ground state (n = 1) and occur at very low energies where they are more likely to interact with the thermal He+ ions introduced by ionization of the diagnostic helium gas-puff injection. Higher densities of excited deuterium are typically present in the Scrape-Off Layer (SOL), divertor, and edge regions of tokamaks, where the LIF and THB helium diagnostics are typically used for nHeI and simultaneous determination of electron temperatures and densities and where contributions from charge-exchange emission may offset these values if not taken into account. The analysis presented in this work shows that due to the higher density of deuterium in the ground rather than in excited states and the divergent behavior of deuterium and He+ density profiles along the SOL and edge regions, the deuterium-He+ charge-exchange contributions to the helium puff emission are 3-orders of magnitude lower than those from electron-impact excitation. Similar plasma conditions are expected in the ITER divertor, with the exception that in the area near the strike-points and targets, the electron temperature is not high enough to excite from the ground state but deuterium, electron, and He+ densities are high enough to dominate the emission from charge-exchange and recombination. These findings strengthen the assumption made in the present line-ratio model that helium emission from gas-puff into plasma is mainly dominated by electron-excitation. It is also shown that, in general, charge-exchange helium emission is 2-orders of magnitude higher than the emission due to recombination. These findings suggest the importance of including charge-exchange processes as a source of neutrals in ionic fractional abundance calculations in plasmas and helium-ash transport modeling in fusion reactors.