Spatiotemporal evolution of runaway electrons from synchrotron images in Alcator C-Mod

TL;DR

This study analyzes the spatiotemporal evolution of runaway electrons in Alcator C-Mod using synchrotron imaging, kinetic modeling, and synthetic diagnostics to understand their behavior and plasma conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis combining experimental synchrotron images with kinetic modeling and synthetic diagnostics to study runaway electron dynamics in a tokamak.

Findings

Identification of plasma conditions for synchrotron emission.

Observation of RE behavior near q=2 surface and MHD activity.

Quantitative RE density profile evolution analysis.

Abstract

In the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, relativistic runaway electron (RE) generation can occur during the flattop current phase of low density, diverted plasma discharges. Due to the high toroidal magnetic field (B = 5.4 T), RE synchrotron radiation is measured by a wide-view camera in the visible wavelength range (~400-900 nm). In this paper, a statistical analysis of over one thousand camera images is performed to investigate the plasma conditions under which synchrotron emission is observed in C-Mod. In addition, the spatiotemporal evolution of REs during one particular discharge is explored in detail via a thorough analysis of the distortion-corrected synchrotron images. To accurately predict RE energies, the kinetic solver CODE [Landreman et al 2014 Comput. Phys. Commun. 185 847-855] is used to evolve the electron momentum-space distribution at six locations throughout the plasma: the magnetic axis and flux surfaces q = 1, 4/3, 3/2, 2, and 3. These results, along with the experimentally-measured magnetic topology and camera geometry, are input into the synthetic diagnostic SOFT [Hoppe et al 2018 Nucl. Fusion 58 026032] to simulate synchrotron emission and detection. Interesting spatial structure near the surface q = 2 is found to coincide with the onset of a locked mode and increased MHD activity. Furthermore, the RE density profile evolution is fit by comparing experimental to synthetic images, providing important insight into RE spatiotemporal dynamics.