Synthetic fast ion diagnostics in tokamaks: comparing the Monte Carlo test particle code ASCOT against experiments

Abstract

Measuring fast ions, most notably fusion alphas, in ITER and future reactors remains an issue that still lacks an adequate solution. Numerical simulations are invaluable in testing the potential and limitations of various proposed diagnostics. However, the validity of the numerical tools first has to be checked against results from existing tokamaks. In this contribution, a variety of synthetic diagnostics for fast ions (collective Thomson scattering, neutral particle analyzer, neutron camera, infrared measurements, fast ion loss detector and activation probe) from the orbit-following Monte Carlo code ASCOT are compared to measurements from several tokamaks (ASDEX Upgrade, DIII-D and JET). Within the limitations of physics included in the numerical model and availability of input data from experiments, the agreement between synthetic data and measurements is found to be quite good.

arXiv comment1st IAEA TM on Fusion Data Processing, Validation and Analysis, 1st of June - 3rd of June 2015, Nice, France

References in corpus (3)

• ASCOT: solving the kinetic equation of minority particle species in tokamak plasmas
• Simulations of fast ion wall loads in ASDEX Upgrade in the presence of magnetic perturbations due to ELM mitigation coils
• Adjoint Monte Carlo Simulation of Fusion Product Activation Probe Experiment in ASDEX Upgrade tokamak