Radio-frequency heating of sloshing ions in a straight field line mirror

Abstract

A scenario to sustain a sloshing ion population with radio-frequency heating in a newly proposed mirror device, the straight field line mirror, is examined. The possibilities of ion cyclotron heating in two-ion species plasma have been analyzed and a scheme with longitudinal wave conversion and fundamental harmonic heating of deuterium ions in tritium plasma has been investigated. This scheme provides efficient ion heating for high deuterium “minority” concentration without substantial conversion to slow waves and heating of the electrons. Numerical calculations carried out for a reactor-scale device show that conversion of the fast magnetosonic wave to the fast Alfvén wave occurs. For reasons of strong cyclotron absorption of the fast Alfvén wave, only a small portion of the wave energy transits through the cyclotron layer and penetrates to the central part of the trap. The power deposition is peaked at the plasma core. The amount of deposited power does not depend sensitively on the parameters of the discharge. The study uses numerical three-dimensional calculations for the time-harmonic boundary problem for Maxwell’s equations. For radio-frequency heating in this scheme, a simple efficient strap antenna is proposed. It has low Q antenna and operates in the regime of global resonance overlapping.