Status of the theoretical study of microwave heating in EBT

The basic strategy of the theoretical study of microwave heating in the ELMO Bumpy Torus (EBT) is outlined and the current status of the various aspects of the study is described. There are four broad areas which are being investigated: (1) heating and wave damping mechanisms, (2) the geometrical optics of microwave propagation in EBT, (3) reflection and mode conversion effects at regions such as cutoff and resonances where the geometrical optics approximation breaks down, and (4) nonlinear effects such as ponderamotive effects and parametric decay. Details are given of the geometrical optics code which has been developed to do ray tracing in arbitrary three dimensional (3-D) plasma equilibria. Examples are given for plasma parameters characteristic of EBT-I and EBT-II. Details are also given of the stochastic heating model currently in use with the 1-D transport code and of the linear wave damping model used in the ray tracing code. The most pressing problems of physics yet to be addressed and the directions for future work are indicated