Influence of plasma turbulence on microwave propagation

Abstract

It is not fully understood how electromagnetic waves propagate through plasma density fluctuations when the size of the fluctuations is comparable with the wavelength of the incident radiation. In this paper, the perturbing effect of a turbulent plasma density layer on a traversing microwave beam is simulated with full-wave simulations. The deterioration of the microwave beam is calculated as a function of the characteristic turbulence structure size, the turbulence amplitude, the depth of the interaction zone and the size of the waist of the incident beam. The maximum scattering is observed for a structure size on the order of half the vacuum wavelength. The scattering and beam broadening was found to increase linearly with the depth of the turbulence layer and quadratically with the fluctuation strength. Consequences for experiments and 3D effects are considered.

arXiv comment16 pages, 13 figures. This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article submitted for publication in Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion. IoP Publishing Ltd is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it

References in corpus (3)

• BOUT++: a framework for parallel plasma fluid simulations
• ECRH beam broadening in the edge turbulent plasma of fusion machines
• Full-wave modeling of the O-X mode conversion in the Pegasus Toroidal Experiment

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Microwave beam broadening due to turbulent plasma density fluctuations within the limit of the Born approximation and beyond
• Overdense microwave plasma heating in the CNT stellarator
• Interaction of radio frequency waves with cylindrical density filaments -- scattering and radiation pressure
• Generation of synthetic magnetized plasma turbulence by representation as a stochastic process
• The deteriorating effect of plasma density fluctuations on microwave beam quality