Abstract
The physics and first results of the new WKBeam code for electron cyclotron beams in tokamak plasmas are presented. This code is developed on the basis of a kinetic radiative transfer model which is general enough to account for the effects of diffraction and density fluctuations on the beam. Our preliminary numerical results show a significant broadening of the power deposition profile in ITER due to scattering from random density fluctuations at the plasma edge, while such scattering effects are found to be negligible in medium-size tokamaks like ASDEX upgrade.
Highlights
This contribution addresses the physics basis and reports preliminary results of a new code, WKBeam [1], for electron cyclotron beams in weakly turbulent plasmas.The quantitative description of the effects of turbulent fluctuations on high-frequency wave beams in tokamaks is not a new problem, and yet it has recently received renewed attention
The physics and first results of the new WKBeam code for electron cyclotron beams in tokamak plasmas are presented. This code is developed on the basis of a kinetic radiative transfer model which is general enough to account for the effects of diffraction and density fluctuations on the beam
Our preliminary numerical results show a significant broadening of the power deposition profile in ITER due to scattering from random density fluctuations at the plasma edge, while such scattering effects are found to be negligible in medium-size tokamaks like ASDEX upgrade
Summary
This contribution addresses the physics basis (section 2) and reports preliminary results (section 3) of a new code, WKBeam [1], for electron cyclotron beams in weakly turbulent plasmas. Successive works reported more detailed calculations based upon the application of existing quasi-optical and ray tracing codes [3,4,5], and on ad-hoc methods [6, 7]. Contributing to this effort, the WKBeam code relies on the well established framework of kinetic models of radiative transfer [8,9,10] and on the wave kinetic formalism of McDonald [9]. The result is a flexible code which accounts for absorption, diffraction and can compute the statistically averaged effect of electron density fluctuations in realistic (experimental or numerical) tokamak equilibria
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