Diffusion of alpha-like MeV ions in TFTR

Single particle confinement of alpha particles is of crucial importance in reactor-grade tokamaks like BPX and ITER. Besides the well-known process of first-orbit losses, mechanisms that could lead to significant loss of alpha particles are turbulence-induced diffusion and toroidal field ripple stochastic diffusion. These two mechanisms have been separately studied in TFTR using two different detectors (one at the bottom of the machine and the other near the outer midplane) which can detect escaping charged fusion products, namely the 1 MeV triton and the 3 MeV proton in D-D plasmas (and also the 3.5 MeV alpha in D-T). The main difficulty in this type of experiment lies in the necessity of distinguishing the diffusion process from the always-present first-orbit loss-process. In this paper, we show how these two processes can be distinguished using the pitch-angle discrimination of the detectors. The pitch-angle is defined here as the angle of the particle trajectory with respect to the toroidal direction and so is a measure of the ion magnetic moment, μ. Results obtained at the midplane would be the first reported evidence of TF ripple diffusion in a tokamak. (author) 3 refs., 2 figs