Method for Measuring the Plasma Temperature at the GOL-NB Facility

Abstract

A new method is proposed for measuring the electron plasma temperature at the GOL-NB facility. The method is based on measuring the ratio between the intensities of the spectral lines emitted by the fast atoms injected into the plasma. The beams of fast hydrogen atoms used for heating the plasma at the GOL-NB facility contain not only atoms with a full energy (E) but also atoms with fractional energies (E/2, E/3, E/18) that appear as a result of the dissociation of the H\(_{2}^{ + }\), H\(_{3}^{ + }\), and H₂O⁺ molecular ions. The spectral lines of the beam components with these energies (and, in particular, the hydrogen H_α line) can be resolved due to the Doppler shift caused by the difference between the atom speeds. For atoms with low energy, the excitation that leads to the photon emission occurs only due to their collisions with thermal electrons, while for atoms with high energy, a sufficient deposition into their excitation is given by their collisions with the plasma ions. This is why the ratio between the intensities of the lines of different beam components depends on the plasma electron temperature, and thus, it can be used to measure this temperature. At the beam energy of 24 keV, the proposed method can be used to measure the electron temperature in the range of up to 40 eV, which is of interest for the current experiments conducted at the GOL-NB facility. Note that measurement of the electron temperature higher than 20 eV requires that the ratio between the spectral line intensities be measured with an accuracy of the order of one percent, and that the attenuation of the neutral beam that passes through the plasma be measured with the same accuracy. The proposed method can be used at other fusion facilities that use fast hydrogen atom injection to measure the temperature of the edge plasma.