High-power gyrotrons for electron cyclotron heating and current drive

Abstract

In many tokamak and stellarator experiments around the globe that are investigating energy production via controlled thermonuclear fusion, electron cyclotron heating and current drive (ECH&CD) are used for plasma start-up, heating, non-inductive current drive and magnetohydrodynamic stability control. ECH will be the first auxiliary heating method used on ITER. Megawatt-class, continuous wave gyrotrons are employed as high-power millimeter (mm)-wave sources. The present review reports on the worldwide state-of-the-art of high-power gyrotrons. Their successful development during recent years changed ECH from a minor to a major heating method. After a general introduction of the various functions of ECH&CD in fusion physics, especially for ITER, section will explain the fast-wave gyrotron interaction principle. Section discusses innovations on the components of modern long-pulse fusion gyrotrons (magnetron injection electron gun, beam tunnel, cavity, quasi-optical output coupler, synthetic diamond output window, single-stage depressed collector) and auxiliary components (superconducting magnets, gyrotron diagnostics, high-power calorimetric dummy loads). Section deals with present megawatt-class gyrotrons for ITER, W7-X, LHD, EAST, KSTAR and JT-60SA, and also includes tubes for moderate pulse length machines such as ASDEX-U, DIII-D, HL-2A, TCV, QUEST and GAMMA-10. In section the development of future advanced fusion gyrotrons is discussed. These are tubes with higher frequencies for DEMO, multi-frequency (multi-purpose) gyrotrons, stepwise frequency tunable tubes for plasma stabilization, injection-locked and coaxial-cavity multi-megawatt gyrotrons, as well as sub-THz gyrotrons for collective Thomson scattering. Efficiency enhancement via multi-stage depressed collectors, fast oscillation recovery methods and reliability, availability, maintainability and inspectability will be discussed at the end of this section.