Development of a synthetic phase contrast imaging diagnostic

Abstract

A “synthetic diagnostic” has been developed to calculate the expected experimental response of phase contrast imaging (PCI), a scattering diagnostic used to measure density fluctuations in laboratory plasmas, to a tokamak discharge modeled with the GYRO nonlinear gyrokinetic code [ J. Candy and R. Waltz, J. Comput. Phys. 186, 545 (2003) ]. The synthetic PCI includes the spatial response of the experimental diagnostic, primarily implemented as a line integral of plasma density along the beam path, and the minimum and maximum wavenumber response resulting from the detection scheme. The synthetic PCI can be used for comparisons between GYRO and experiment as well as studies of the PCI response.