Experimental investigation of the ripple induced losses of perpendicularly injected beam ions in the low aspect ratio helical system CHS

Abstract

Confinement of perpendicularly injected beam ions has been investigated experimentally both in the standard configuration and in the drift optimized configuration of the CHS heliotron/torsatron by means of the neutron technique. The experimental results indicate that the confinement of trapped beam ions is poor in both configurations. The observed loss rate of trapped beam ions was very high and this high rate is not explained by losses due to charge exchange or collisional scattering from the timescale perspective. Full gyro-motion following orbit calculations showed that in the peripheral region of CHS plasmas, trapped beam ions are promptly lost because they immediately intersect the vacuum chamber wall due to their large Larmor radii. It also suggested that in the core domain the collisionless transition behaviour is the key to understanding the rapid loss of beam ions. It was shown that the magnetic moment of perpendicularly injected beam ions is not well conserved in CHS. The rapid losses of perpendicularly injected beam ions are probably due to non-adiabatic effects resulting in the transition behaviour of energetic ions.