https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201920301005
The deteriorating effect of plasma density fluctuations on microwave beam quality
1
Institute of Interfacial Process Engineering and Plasma Technology, University of Stuttgart , Stuttgart Germany
2
Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics Garching Germany
3
Institute for Fusion Studies, University of Texas at Austin , TX USA
4
General Atomics PO Box 85608, San Diego CA USA
5
York Plasma Insitute, Department of Physics, University of York, York U.K
6
Department of Applied Physics, Aalto University , Aalto Finland
* e-mail: koehn@igvp.uni-stuttgart.de
Published online: 25 March 2019
Turbulent plasma edge density fluctuations can broaden a traversing microwave beam degrading its quality. This can be a problem for scenarios relying on a high spatial localization of the deposition of injected microwave power, like controlling MHD instabilities. Here we present numerical estimations of the scattering of a microwave beam by density fluctuations over a large parameter range, including extrapolations to ITER. Two codes are used, the full-wave code IPF-FDMC and the wave kinetic equation solver WKBeam. A successful comparison between beam broadening obtained from DIII-D experiments and corresponding full-wave simulations is shown.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2019
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
