Japan-US Collaboration on ICRF Heating and Current Drive Experiments and Modeling
The ICRF heating experiments on the Alcator C-Mod Tokamak at MIT have been
highly successful. With the additional power and current drive capabilities
currently being added in collaboration with PPPL (Princeton Plasma Physics
Laboratory), the emphasis of research will shift toward steady-state
advanced Tokamak experiments using current drive and profile control. MIT
is already preparing the infrastructure necessary to support remote
collaborators.
Participation in these experiments by the University of Tokyo group,
including planning of experiments, real-time participation, and data
analysis, became possible with the increased bandwidth provided by APAN.
The University of Tokyo group, collaborating with MIT physicists, performed
theoretical modeling of various heating and current drive scenarios in
1998. The results indicate potential usefulness of the harmonic fast wave
for current drive in both conventional and spherical Tokamaks.
