Operation of the TFTR Pellet Charge Exchange Diagnostic in the Pulse Counting Mode during H+ RF-Minority Heating
Authors: S.S. Medley, M.P. Petrov, A.L. Roquemore, and R.K. Fisher
The Pellet Charge Exchange technique on TFTR has been used primarily to obtain active charge exchange measurements using a high energy (0.5 - 4.0 MeV) neutral particle analyzer (NPA) in conjunction with impurity pellet injection (Li and B) with the scintillator-photomultiplier detector system operated in the current mode. While passive measurements using pulse counting were also obtained using this instrumentation, operation in this mode was very restrictive with pulse counting rates limited to less than approximately 10 kHz in the absence of any significant neutron and gamma induced background signal. An upgrade to a specialized pulse counting capability which was developed by the Ioffe Institute was implemented which consisted of CsI(Tl) scintillators having features designed to minimize signals induced by background neutron and gamma rays and 16-channel pulse height analysis electronics on each of the eight NPA energy channels. Passive measurements of RF-driven energetic hydrogen minority ions which served to verify operation of the pulse counting mode are reported. It is shown that in the passive mode the main donors for the neutralization of H+ ions in this energy range are C5+ ions. The measured effective H+ tail temperatures range from 0.15 MeV at an RF power of 2 MW to 0.35 MeV at 6 MW.