Overview of the FTU results

Steady internal transport barriers (ITBs) are obtained in FTU at ITER-relevant magnetic field and density (ne0 ≥ 1.3 x 1020 m-3) in almost full non-inductive discharges, sustained by lower hybrid (LH) and electron cyclotron (EC) RF waves sources. Similarly to ITER, only electrons are directly heated which in turn heat ions via collisions and no momentum is injected. Collisions do not affect the mechanisms of turbulence suppression and energy transport. At the highest densities the ion thermal conductivity remains ≤ the ohmic level, while the energy confinement time exceeds the ITER 97-L scaling by about 1.6 times. The ITB radius can be varied in the range 0.2 ≤ r/a ≤ 0.65 modifying the radial profile of the LH driven current, acting mainly on the safety factor q. A liquid lithium limiter (LLL) of innovative design, composed of a mesh of porous capillaries, has been tested successfully for the first time on a medium size tokamak. The LLL surface showed no damage up to the maximum thermal load of 5 MW m-2. With LLL cleaner plasmas are obtained and the particle recycling strongly drops; new interesting regimes of particle transport arise at high density, with highly peaked profiles. Significant progress in disruption mitigation by means of EC power has shown that they can be avoided when absorption occurs directly on the MHD islands driving the disruption. Feedback control/suppression of MHD tearing modes (TM, m = 2) with EC waves has been achieved relying on a real-time detection of the TM and of its radial location. Testing the collective Thomson scattering in ITER-relevant configuration has stressed that avoiding backscattered radiation to the source is very crucial. The theory of the evolution of fishbone-like instabilities driven by LH generated supra-thermal electrons in FTU is outlined, and its relation to the trapped α particles dynamics is stressed