High-harmonic ion cyclotron heating and current drive in ultra-small aspect ratio tokamaks

Ultra-small aspect ratio tokamaks present a totally new plasma environment for heating and current drive experiments and involve a number of physics issues that have not previously been explored. These devices operate at low magnetic field and relatively high density so that the effective dielectric constant of the plasma to high harmonic fast waves (HHFW), is quite high, and perpendicular wavelength of fast waves is very short. λ ∼ 2.0 cm compared with λ - 10-20 cm. This makes possible strong electron absorption at high harmonics of the ion cyclotron frequency, Ωi, and at fairly high phase velocity in relation to electron thermal velocity. If the antenna system can control the parallel wave spectrum, this offers the promise of high efficiency off-axis current drive and the possibility for current drive radial profile control. Antenna phasing is ineffective for profile control in conventional tokamaks because of central absorption. There are also challenges for antenna design in this regime because of the high dielectric constant and the large angle of the magnetic field with respect to the equatorial plane (∼45 degrees), which varies greatly during current ramp. Preliminary experiments in this HHFW regime are being carried out in CDX-U