Soft X-Ray Spectroscopy on the TFR Tokamak

Abstract

The 2m-grating radius, extreme grazing incidence (1.5°) Schwob-Fraenkel spectrograph was developed at the Racah Institute of Physics (under CEA contract) more than 10 years ago. The first results (using photographic plates) on the TFR tokamak permitted the indentification of the spectrum of highly ionised Mo ions in the 5-50 Å spectral region /1/. Subsequently, the system was modified by J.L. Schwob into a duochromator, using two channeltron electron multipliers independently movable along the Rowland circle. It was thus possible to obtain radial profiles of the emissivities of the strongest lines of the H-and He-like isoelectronic sequences of light impurities in the 18-42 Å spectral range /2/. Recently, the duochromator has been converted into a multichannel spectrometer by equipping it with a microchannelplate (MCP) detector again movable along the Rowland circle. The detector consists of a MgF2coated, funneled MCP, associated with a phosphor screen image intensifier and coupled by a flexible fiber optic conduit to a 1024 element photodiode array (controlled and read-out by a commercially available PAR-1461 EGG Princeton Applied Research optical multichannel analyser system). The first of this type of detector was developed at Princeton for the PLT and TFTR tokamaks and was described by Schwob et al /3/. An identical system has been installed on TFR, using a 20 /μm entrance slit and a 600 groove mm−1Jobin-Yvon holographic grating. This instrument has been routinely used during the last year of TFR operation to monitor spectra of both intrinsic impurities (C, 0, Cr, Fe, and Ni, with traces of Mn, Cl, and S) and purposely injected impurity elements in the 10-330 Å spectral range. The spectrometer has been used in both the spectrographic and the polychromator modes. In the former mode, spectra of highly-ionized, unstudied, heavy elements (injected either by the laser blow-off technique or as gaseous elements) have been obtained /4,5/. In the latter utilization (in which selected individual pixels are read-out as function of time) line radiance evolutions of several different Fe ions have been simultaneously obtained on a single discharge. This has allowed the impurity transport to be modelled /6/ even though the system was not absolutely calibrated, since different ionization degrees have different time evolutions.