Feasibility study of electron-scale electron temperature fluctuation diagnostics

Xiang Chen

MIT

Tuesday, December 3, 2019

5:00pm

NW17-218

PSFC Student Seminars

Measurements of turbulent fluctuations of physical quantities such as density, temperature, electric field, play an important role in the study of transport. The electron-scale electron temperature fluctuations (denoted as T̃­­_ee)are predicted to exist in fusion plasmas and they're also predicted to contribute significantly to heat loss in a fusion reactor. Diagnostics for T̃­­_ee  is crucial for better understanding plasma transport and predicting the performance of plasmas in next-generation tokamaks like ITER and DEMO. However, to date, diagnostics for T̃­­_ee  are still missing. We aim to use simulations to explore the feasibility of making measurements of T̃­­_ee  in the core plasma of tokamaks and stellarators, which paves the way for further hardware installation of this diagnostic on a fusion device. The simulations are carried out using CGYRO, a gyrokinetic code for collisional plasmas developed by General Atomics, and the results are compared with the ones obtained with an old code GYRO. The good agreements between the two codes lay a solid foundation for further study.