Achievement of High Fusion Performance in JT-60U Reversed Shear Discharges

Abstract

Fusion performance of reversed shear discharges with an L-mode edge has been significantly improved in a thermonuclear dominant regime with up to 2.8 MA of plasma current in the JT-60U tokamak. The core plasma energy is efficiently confined due to the existence of persistent internal transport barriers formed for both ions and electrons at a large minor radius of $r/a\ensuremath{\sim}0.7$ near the boundary of the reversed shear region. In an assumed deuterium-tritium fuel, the peak fusion amplification factor defined for transient conditions involving the $dW/dt$ term would be in excess of unity.