Reflectometer measurements of density fluctuations in tokamak plasmas (invited)

Abstract

Many anomalous features observed in reflectometer measurements of turbulent fluctuations in tokamak plasmas, such as loss of coherent reflection, large amplitude fluctuations, large angular divergence of the reflected waves, and correlation lengths of the order of the free-space wavelength of the probe beam, can be explained by modeling the plasma fluctuations as a poloidally varying random phase grating located at the cutoff with a phase magnitude given by 1D geometric optics. A key result of this analysis is that the turbulence spectrum cannot be inferred from phase measurements when large amplitude fluctuations are observed at the receiver. However, the turbulence spectrum may still be recovered from phase measurements by use of imaging optics and wide angle phase sensitive receivers.