Self-consistent calculation of the effects of RF injection in the HHFW heating regimes on the evolution of fast ions in toroidal plasmas

Abstract

A critical question for the use of ion cyclotron range of frequency (ICRF) heating in the ITER device and beyond is interaction of fast waves with energetic ion populations from neutral beam injection (NBI), fusion reactions, and minority ions accelerated by the RF waves themselves. Several experiments have demonstrated that the interaction between fast waves and fast ions can indeed be strong enough to significantly modify the NB ion population. To model the RF/fast ion interaction and the resulting fast ion distribution, a recent extension of the full wave solver TORIC v.5 that includes non-Maxwellian effects has been combined with the Monte Carlo NUBEAM code through an RF “kick” operator. In this work, we present an initial verification of the NUBEAM RF “kick” operator for high harmonic fast wave (HHFW) heating regime in NSTX plasma.