Interaction between filaments and ICRF in the plasma edge

Abstract

• Recent progresses in understanding of interaction between filaments and ICRF in the plasma edge are summarized. • RF induced convective cells can poloidally distort, stretch and break up filaments and influence the local plasma transport in the SOL. • The mutual influence of multiple filaments induces poloidally distributed and radially extended stripe structures in the wave fields and causes wave scattering. • Filaments redirect part of the RF power from the perpendicular direction to the parallel direction as a result of rectification of antenna power spectrum and mode conversion of fast wave to slow wave. Ion Cyclotron Range of Frequencies (ICRF) heating is a standard heating method for magnetic confinement fusion devices. ICRF waves can interact with filaments in the scrape-off layer (SOL) and induces a series of important phenomena. Understanding their interaction and the related physics is essential to the success of ICRF heating and plasma confinement. This paper is a review paper summarizing the recent progress in understanding of interaction between filaments and ICRF in the plasma edge and presents some key experimental and simulation results. In particular, the influence of RF convective cells on filament transport and the influence of filament on RF wave scattering, energy spectrum density, power redirection and wave mode conversion are discussed in detail. Most results shown in the paper make use of the published work, and some new results about mode conversion are also present.