RF experiments on spherical torus plasmas

Abstract

Experimental operations are about to begin on the next generation of spherical torus (ST) devices-the National Spherical Torus eXperiment (NSTX) in the U.S. and the Mega-Amp Spherical Torus (MAST) in the U.K. The application of RF heating and current drive to these high beta, compact confinement devices is a challenging problem. The initial focus for NSTX had been on the High Harmonic Fast Wave (HHFW) regime. Although modeling of HHFW heating and current drive has been performed at ORNL, UCSD, MIT, and PPPL, there are few experiments in this frequency range. In conventional tokamaks, the DIII-D experiments at the 5th–7th cyclotron harmonic are the closest approach to the HHFW regime. In an ST, the only RF heating experiments to date have been performed at the 15th harmonic on the Current Drive eXperiment-Upgrade (CDX-U) at PPPL. General features of HHFW heating and current drive and the degree to which experimental confirmation of these features is available will be discussed.