Improved charge-coupled device detectors for high-speed, charge exchange spectroscopy studies on the DIII-D tokamak

Charge exchange spectroscopy is one of the key ion diagnostics on the DIII-D tokamak. It allows determination of ion temperature, poloidal and toroidal velocity, impurity density, and radial electric field Er throughout the plasma. For the 2003 experimental campaign, we replaced the intensified photodiode array detectors on the central portion of the DIII-D charge exchange spectroscopy system with advanced charge–coupled device (CCD) detectors mounted on faster (f/4.7) Czerny–Turner spectrometers equipped with toroidal mirrors. The CCD detectors are improved versions of the ones installed on our edge system in 1999. The combination improved the photoelectron signal level by about a factor of 20 and the signal to noise by a factor of 2–8, depending on the absolute signal level. The new cameras also allow shorter minimum integration times while archiving to PC memory: 0.552 ms for the slower, lower-read noise (15 e) readout mode and 0.274 ms in the faster, higher-read noise (30 e) mode.