Measurements of the radial profile of the plasma isotopic composition in JET plasmas using Alfvén eigenmodes

Abstract

The measurement of the plasma isotopic composition is necessary in future burning plasma devices such as ITER and DEMO as a tool for optimizing the deuterium/tritium (DT) fusion performance. This paper reports on the results of experiments performed on the JET tokamak where toroidal Alfvén eigenmodes (TAEs) with toroidal mode number (N) up to were actively driven with a set of in-vessel antennas, and were then used to infer the value of the plasma isotopic composition at different radial positions. A novel and important result with respect to previous work on JET is that by correctly including the effect of plasma impurities in the calculation of the Alfvén frequency, through its dependence on the plasma mass, it has become now possible to distinguish plasmas with different majority ion species but with the same charge-to-mass ratio, notably majority deuterium and helium4 plasmas. Furthermore, and combined with modelling of AEs in JET discharges, these experimental results indicate that a diagnostic system based on the detection of AEs with different toroidal mode numbers and at different frequencies, could provide profile measurements of the plasma isotopic composition in future burning plasma devices such as ITER and DEMO.