Design of the Tore Supra motional Stark effect diagnostic

This article describes the overall design of the motional Stark effect diagnostic on Tore Supra (not water cooled in its first version) and the results obtained. The diagnostic is composed of nine viewing lines measuring the plasma every 8 cm with a spatial resolution varying from 3 to 6 cm. A tube placed inside the port adjacent to the neutral beam contains a stainless- steel mirror and SFL6 optic lenses that carry the image of the neutral beam towards the optical fibers. On Tore Supra the diagnostics having components inside the machine have to face thermal load difficulties linked with the long shots, and this will be the case for ITER diagnostics. This is why for safety reasons the insulating window is placed at the rear side of the tube, and consequently the optics is under the machine vacuum. For motional Stark effect, before reaching the thermal limits on the components, a first limitation comes from the polarization modifications induced by the temperature gradients on the lenses (birefringence effect). This limitation is estimated in terms of plasma duration. The associated diagnostic neutral beam (60 keV, 400 kW, 5 s) works in hydrogen for a higher velocity and a better plasma penetration. As a consequence the beam spectrum exhibits a large Doppler shift and a clear separation of the Stark components. The detection uses the classical elements of the polarimetry method, wide aperture photoelastic modulators, linear polarizer, narrow interference filters, and photomultipliers. The signal is processed digitally (250 kHz) for the extraction of the Fourier components that allow the calculation of the magnetic field pitch angles. The first measurements obtained during Ohmic shots for various plasma currents are in good agreement with the current diffusion calculations done with the CRONOS code. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.