Role of radiation re-absorption in the thermal helium beam diagnostic

Abstract

The Thermal Helium Beam (THB) is a diagnostic for simultaneously measuring the electron temperature and density profiles of the plasma edge and scrape off layer (SOL). It exploits the line ratio technique of selected He line intensities, emitted by He gas puffed inside the plasma, to locally estimate the plasma properties through a dedicated collisional radiative model (CRM). Standard THB diagnostics used in nuclear fusion devices measure three HeI emission lines: 667.8, 706.5, and 728.1 nm. For the RFP experiment RFX-mod2, a new THB is designed and tested for the first time at the TCV tokamak. It acquires an additional emission line at 501.6 nm, which is exploited to estimate the radiation re-absorption, which is not negligible in regions of large neutral He densities (leading to high re-absorption) and simultaneously low electron density and temperature (lack of other excitation channels). It affects the measurements most strongly at the far SOL, while the significance of re-absorption decreases as it approaches the separatrix. In this paper, plasma density and temperature profiles of the plasma edge at the outboard midplane of TCV, measured with this newly designed THB, are presented. For the first time, the effect of radiation re-absorption on the estimation of electron temperature and density profiles is experimentally measured in a tokamak using the 501 nm line emission intensity. Different CRMs are compared with and without radiation re-absorption, showing good agreement when re-absorption is included and demonstrating how it plays an important role in the far SOL, as expected.