High density internal transport barriers for burning plasma operation

One of the proposed ITER scenarios foresees the creation and sustainment of an internal transport barrier (ITB) in order to improve the confinement properties of the hot core plasma. The more stringent requests are: the ITB must be sustained with electron heating only with no or very small external momentum source, the strong collisional coupling at the envisaged density (line average >1.0 1020 m-3) must not prevent the barrier existence, the bootstrap current created by the large induced gradients must have a radial profile consistent with that requested by the barrier creation and sustainment. To all these items the studies carried out in FTU in the same density range (ne0 ?1.5 1020 m-3) provide encouraging prospects. With pure electron heating and current drive (LH+ECH) steady electron barrier are generated and maintained with central e- temperature >5.0 keV. Almost full CD conditions are established with a bootstrap current close to 25% of the total and well aligned with that driven by the LH waves and responsible for the barrier building. The clear change in the density fluctuations close to the ITB radius, observed by reflectometry, indicates stabilization of turbulence that is consistent with the drop of the thermal electron diffusivity inside the ITB to very low values, ?e<0.5 m2/s estimated by the transport analysis. The 10 fold neutron rate increase testifies a significant collisional ion heating, even though usually ?Ti0/Ti0 does not exceed 40%, because the e--i + equipartition time, always 4-5 times longer than the energy confinement time, does not allow thermal equilibrium with electrons to be attained. The ion thermal diffusivity inside the barrier must be lowered to the neoclassical level to account for the observed Ti(r) profiles, clearly indicating at least a non-degraded ion transport. The global confinement in turn improves by 1.6 times above the FTU L-scaling. The ITB radius can be controlled by varying the LH power deposition profile that is affected mostly by the total current, while its strength by varying the amount of the ECH power delivered inside the ITB. The density profile remains enough peaked despite the inward particle Ware pinch is negligible, while no evidence of impurity accumulation is observed. (Author)