Investigation of lower hybrid physics through power modulation experiments on Alcator C-Mod

Abstract

Lower hybrid current drive (LHCD) is an attractive tool for off-axis current profile control in magnetically confined tokamak plasmas and burning plasmas (ITER), because of its high current drive efficiency. The LHCD system on Alcator C-Mod operates at 4.6 GHz, with ~ 1 MW of coupled power, and can produce a wide range of launched parallel refractive index (n[subscript ∣∣]) spectra. A 32 chord, perpendicularly viewing hard x-ray camera has been used to measure the spatial and energy distribution of fast electrons generated by lower hybrid (LH) waves. Square-wave modulation of LH power on a time scale much faster than the current relaxation time does not significantly alter the poloidal magnetic field inside the plasma and thus allows for realistic modeling and consistent plasma conditions for different n[subscript ∣∣] spectra. Inverted hard x-ray profiles show clear changes in LH-driven fast electron location with differing n[subscript ∣∣]. Boxcar binning of hard x-rays during LH power modulation allows for ~ 1 ms time resolution which is sufficient to resolve the build-up, steady-state, and slowing-down phases of fast electrons. Ray-tracing/Fokker-Planck modeling in combination with a synthetic hard x-raydiagnostic shows quantitative agreement with the x-ray data for high n[subscript ∣∣] cases. The time histories of hollow x-ray profiles have been used to measure off-axis fast electron transport in the outer half of the plasma, which is found to be small on a slowing down time scale.