Density fluctuation effects on electron cyclotron emission correlation measurements in optically gray plasmas

Measurements of electron temperature using electron cyclotron emission (ECE) may be contaminated by density effects in plasmas with low optical depth. ECE intensity fluctuations in these plasmas will include a component dependent on density fluctuations as well. Correlation measurements, which will extract the temperature fluctuations from the dominant radiometer thermal noise, will include correlated density fluctuations in the result. In tokamak core plasmas, where normalized density fluctuations have been measured to be about 1%, this effect can be considerable (∼100%) at low levels of temperature fluctuations. However, at ''relevant'' levels, defined by the amount of anomalous heat transport, these effects are reduced, at least in TEXT-U. While exact interpretation of temperature fluctuation amplitudes is compromised, statements regarding the relevance of the inferred temperature fluctuation amplitudes can be made relatively unambiguously