Role of Lorentz–Stark broadening of hydrogen spectral lines in magnetized plasmas: Applications to magnetic fusion and solar physics

Abstract

Broadening of hydrogen spectral lines in plasmas is an important diagnostic tool for many applications (here and below by “hydrogen atoms” and “hydrogen spectral lines” we mean atoms and spectral lines of hydrogen, deuterium, and tritium). In magnetized plasmas radiating hydrogen atoms moving with the velocity v across the magnetic field B experience a Lorentz electric field EL=v×B/c in addition to other electric fields. Since the velocity v has a distribution, so does the Lorentz field, thus making an additional contribution to the broadening of spectral lines. Compared to previous studies of this contribution, we cover the following new aspects. First, we consider the Lorentz–Doppler broadening of highly-excited hydrogen lines and produce new analytical results for arbitrary strength of the magnetic field B. We show for the first time that in the high-B case, the π-components of hydrogen lines are significantly suppressed compared to the σ-components. Second, we derive analytically Lorentz-broadened profiles of highly-excited hydrogen lines. We obtain expressions for the principal quantum number nmax of the last observable hydrogen line in the spectral series. These expressions differ very significantly from the corresponding Inglis–Teller result and constitute a new diagnostic method allowing to measure the product T1/2B, where T is the atomic temperature. Third, we consider magnetized plasmas containing a low-frequency electrostatic turbulence. This kind of turbulence causes anomalous transport phenomena (e.g., the anomalous resistivity) and is therefore very important to be diagnosed. We derive analytically distributions of the total electric field and the corresponding Stark profiles of hydrogen lines. We demonstrate that our findings lead to a significantly revised interpretation of the previous and future experimental data in magnetic fusion and the observational data in solar physics.