Impurity pellet injection experiments at TFTR. Final performance report

Abstract

Impurity (Li and C) pellet injection experiments on TFTR have produced a number of new and significant results. (1) We observe reproducible improvements of TFTR supershots after wall-conditioning by Li pellet injection (`lithiumization`). (2) We have made accurate measurements of the pitch angle profiles of the internal magnetic field using two novel techniques. The first measures the internal field pitch from the polarization angles of Li{sup +} line emission from the pellet ablation cloud, while the second measures the pitch angle profiles by observing the tilt of the cigar-shaped Li{sup +} emission region of the ablation cloud. (3) Extensive measurements of impurity pellet penetration into plasmas with central temperatures ranging from {approximately}0.3 to {approximately}7 keV have been made and compared with available theoretical models. Other aspects of pellet cloud physics have been investigated. (4) Using pellets as a well defined perturbation has allowed study of transport phenomena. In the case of small pellet perturbations, the characteristics of the background plasmas are probed, while with large pellets, pellet induced effects are clearly observed. These main results are discussed in more detail in this paper.