Plasma confinement in the GAMMA 10 tandem mirror

The central-cell density and the diamagnetic signal were doubled due to plug potential formation by ECRH in the hot ion mode experiments on the GAMMA 10 tandem mirror. In order to obtain these remarkable results, the axisymmetrized heating patterns of ECRH and ICRF were optimized. Furthermore, conducting plates were installed adjacent to the surface of the plasma along the flat shaped magnetic flux tube located at the anchor transition regions; the plates may contribute to reduce some irregular electric fields produced possibly with ECRH in these thin flux tube regions. The conducting plates contributed to the reduction of the radial loss rate to be less than 3% of the total particle losses along with the improvements in the reproducibility of the experiments and the controllability of the potential confinement. The increases in the central-cell density and the diamagnetism in association with the increase in the plug potentials scaled well with increasing the ECRH powers. A plug potential of 0.6 kV and a density increase of 100% were achieved using an ECRH power of 140 kW injected into both plug regions. The plasma confinement was improved by an order of magnitude over a simple mirror confinement due to the tandem mirror potential formation. (author)