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A motional Stark effect (MSE) diagnostic is now installed and operating routinely on the MAST spherical tokamak, with 35 radial channels, spatial resolution of ~ 2.5 cm, and time resolution of ~ 1 ms at angular noise levels of ~ 0.5°. Conventional (albeit very narrow) interference filters isolate p or s polarized emission. Avalanche photodiode detectors with digital phase-sensitive detection measure the harmonics of a pair of photoelastic modulators operating at 20 and 23 kHz, and thus the polarization state. The p component is observed to be significantly stronger than s, in reasonably good agreement with atomic physics calculations, and as a result, almost all channels are now operated on p. Trials with a wide filter that admits the entire Stark pattern (relying on the net polarization of the emission) have demonstrated performance almost as good as the conventional channels. MSE-constrained equilibrium reconstructions can readily be produced between pulses. © 2010 EURATOM

Several improvements to the MAST plant and diagnostics have facilitated new studies advancing the physics basis for ITER and DEMO, as well as for future spherical tokamaks (STs). Using the increased heating capabilities P NBI ⩽ 3.8 MW H-mode at I p = 1.2 MA was accessed showing that the energy confinement on MAST scales more weakly with I p and more strongly with B t than in the ITER IPB98(y, 2) scaling. Measurements of the fuel retention of shallow pellets extrapolate to an ITER particle throughput of 70% of its original designed total throughput capacity. The anomalous momentum diffusion, χϕ, is linked to the ion diffusion, χi, with a Prandtl number close to P ϕ ≈ χϕ/χi ≈ 1, although χi approaches neoclassical values. New high spatial resolution measurements of the edge radial electric field, E r , show that the position of steepest gradients in electron pressure and E r (i.e. shearing rate) are coincident, but their magnitudes are not linked. The T e pedestal width on MAST scales with rather than ρpol. The edge localized mode (ELM) frequency for type-IV ELMs, new in MAST, was almost doubled using n = 2 resonant magnetic perturbations from a set of four external coils (n = 1, 2). A new internal 12 coil set (n ⩽ 3) has been commissioned. The filaments in the inter-ELM and L-mode phase are different from ELM filaments, and the characteristics in L-mode agree well with turbulence calculations. A variety of fast particle driven instabilities were studied from 10 kHz saturated fishbone like activity up to 3.8 MHz compressional Alfvén eigenmodes. Fast particle instabilities also affect the off-axis NBI current drive, leading to fast ion diffusion of the order of 0.5 m2 s−1 and a reduction in the driven current fraction from 40% to 30%. EBW current drive start-up is demonstrated for the first time in a ST generating plasma currents up to 55 kA. Many of these studies contributed to the physics basis of a planned upgrade to MAST.

A major upgrade to the charge exchange recombination spectroscopy system on MAST has recently been implemented. The new system consists of a high-throughput spectrometer coupled to a total of 224 spatial channels, including toroidal and poloidal views of both neutral heating beams on MAST. Radial resolution is ∼1cm, comparable to the ion Larmor radius. The toroidal views are configured with 64 channels per beam, while the poloidal views have 32 channels per beam. Background channels for both poloidal and toroidal views are also provided. A large transmission grating is at the heart of the new spectrometer, with high quality single lens reflex lenses providing excellent imaging performance and permitting the full exploitation of the available etendue of the camera sensor. The charge-coupled device camera chosen has four-tap readout at a maximum aggregate speed of 8.8MHz, and it is capable of reading out the full set of 224 channels in less than 4ms. The system normally operates at 529nm, viewing the C5+ em...

Exploiting the motional Stark effect (MSE) in the low magnetic fields of spherical tokamaks such as MAST is complicated by the Doppler smearing of the relatively closely spaced Stark components. Ex ...