Calculation of the nonlinear relativistic Thomson scattering fields and Its application to electron distribution function diagnostic

Analytical results obtained recently of the ab-initio classical incoherent Thomson Scattering (TS) spectrum from a single-electron (Alvarez-Estrada et al 2012 Phys. Plasmas 19 062302) have been numerically implemented in a paralelized code to efficiently compute the TS emission from a given electron distribution function, irrespective of its characteristics and/or the intensity of the incoming radiation. These analytical results display certain differences, when compared with other authors, in the general case of incoming linearly and circularly polarized radiation and electrons with arbitrary initial directions. We regard such discrepancies and the ubiquitous interest in TS as motivations for this work. Here, we implement some analytical advances (like generalized Bessel functions for incoming linearly polarized radiation) in TS. The bulk of this work reports on the efficient computation of TS spectra (based upon our analytical approach), for an electron population having an essentially arbitrary distribution function and for both incoming linearly and circularly polarized radiation. A detailed comparison between the present approach and a previous Monte Carlo one (Pastor et al 2011 Nuclear Fusion 51 043011), dealing with the ab-initio computation of TS spectra, is reported. Both approaches are shown to fully agree with each other. As key computational improvements, the analytical technique yields a × 30 to × 100 gain in computation time and is a very flexible tool to compute the scattered spectrum and eventually the scattered electromagnetic fields in the time domain. The latter are computed explicitly here for the first time, as far as we know. Scaling laws for the power integrated over frequency versus initial kinetic energy are studied for the case of isotropic and monoenergetic electron distribution functions and their potential application as diagnostic tools for high-energy populations is briefly discussed. Finally, we discuss the application of these techniques to the obtention and interpretation of TS spectra in fusion plasmas and the inverse problem, i.e. the construction of the electron distribution function that best fits experimentally obtained TS data.