Quasi-optical theory of microwave plasma heating in open magnetic trap

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive quasi-optical theory for microwave plasma heating in open magnetic traps, incorporating wave effects like diffraction and absorption, and introduces a new numerical code validated with realistic simulations.

Contribution

It generalizes the quasi-optical approach to weakly inhomogeneous gyrotrotropic media and proposes a new integral quasi-optical equation for plasma heating analysis.

Findings

Validated the QOOT code with realistic electron cyclotron heating simulations.

Extended quasi-optical theory to include diffraction, absorption, and dispersion effects.

Provided a new integral equation framework for microwave plasma heating in open traps.

Abstract

Microwave heating of a high-temperature plasma confined in a large-scale open magnetic trap, including all important wave effects like diffraction, absorption, dispersion and wave beam aberrations, is described for the first time within the first-principle technique based on consistent Maxwell's equations. With this purpose, the quasi-optical approach is generalized over weakly inhomogeneous gyrotrotropic media with resonant absorption and spatial dispersion, and a new form of the integral quasi-optical equation is proposed. An effective numerical technique for this equation's solution is developed and realized in a new code QOOT, which is verified with the simulations of realistic electron cyclotron heating scenarios at the Gas Dynamic Trap at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics (Novosibirsk, Russia).