Full wave simulation of lower hybrid waves in Maxwellian plasma based on the finite element method

A full wave simulation of the lower-hybrid (LH) wave based on the finite element method is presented. For the LH wave, the most important terms of the dielectric tensor are the cold plasma contribution and the electron Landau damping (ELD) term, which depends only on the component of the wave vector parallel to the background magnetic field. The nonlocal hot plasma ELD effect was expressed as a convolution integral along the magnetic field lines and the resultant integro-differential Helmholtz equation was solved iteratively. The LH wave propagation in a Maxwellian tokamak plasma based on the Alcator C experiment was simulated for electron temperatures in the range of 2.5-10 keV. Comparison with ray tracing simulations showed good agreement when the single pass damping is strong. The advantages of the new approach include a significant reduction of computational requirements compared to full wave spectral methods and seamless treatment of the core, the scrape off layer and the launcher regions.