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Title: Bifurcation of quiescent H-mode to a wide pedestal regime in DIII-D and advances in the understanding of edge harmonic oscillations

Journal Article · · Nuclear Fusion
 [1];  [1];  [1];  [2];  [3];  [1];  [1];  [4];  [1];  [5];  [2];  [5];  [1];  [1];  [4]
  1. General Atomics, San Diego, CA (United States)
  2. Univ. of California, Los Angeles, CA (United States)
  3. Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. (PPPL), Princeton, NJ (United States)
  4. Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (United States)
  5. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States)

New experimental studies and modelling of the coherent Edge Harmonic Oscillation (EHO), which regulates the conventional Quiescent H-mode (QH-mode) edge, validate the proposed hypothesis of edge rotational shear in destabilizing the low-n kink peeling mode as the additional drive mechanism for the EHO. The observed minimum edge ExB shear required for the EHO decreases linearly with pedestal collisionality v$$*\atop{e}$$, which is favorable for operating QH-mode in machines with low collisionality and low rotation such as ITER. In addition, the QH-mode regime in DIII-D has recently been found to bifurcate into a new ‘wide-pedestal’ state at low torque in double-null shaped plasmas, characterized by increased pedestal height, width and thermal energy confinement [Burrell POP 23 (2016) 056103, Chen NF 57 (2017) 022007]. This potentially provides an alternate path for achieving high performance ELM-stable operation at low torque, in addition to the low-torque QH-mode sustained with applied 3D fields. Multi-branch low-k and intermediate-k turbulences are observed in the ‘wide-pedestal’. New experiments support the hypothesis that the decreased edge ExB shear enables destabilization of broadband turbulence, which relaxes edge pressure gradients, improves peeling-ballooning stability and allows a wider and thus higher pedestal. The ability to accurately predict the critical ExB shear for EHO and maintain high performance QH-mode at low torque is an essential requirement for projecting QH-mode operation to ITER and future machines.

Research Organization:
Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. (PPPL), Princeton, NJ (United States); General Atomics, San Diego, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Contributing Organization:
The DIII-D Team
Grant/Contract Number:
FG02-08ER54999; AC02-09CH11466; FG02-94ER54235; FG02-08ER54984; FC02-04ER54698
OSTI ID:
1373372
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1374546
Journal Information:
Nuclear Fusion, Vol. 57, Issue 8; ISSN 0029-5515
Publisher:
IOP ScienceCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 7 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (2)

A Faraday-effect polarimeter for fast magnetic dynamics measurement on DIII-D journal October 2018
Edge state selection by modulating E  ×  B shearing profile in toroidally confined plasmas journal May 2019

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