First results of collective scattering on JET (invited)

The fast ion and α-particle diagnostic at JET is based on collective Thomson scattering of high power millimeter-wave radiation. The principal aim of the diagnostic will be the measurement of the spatially resolved velocity distribution of fast α particles when tritium is introduced in JET plasmas, although several other applications are foreseen. The diagnostic uses a 140 GHz, 500 kW, gyrotron as the source of probing radiation and a heterodyne detection system. The diagnostic came into operation during the last JET operational campaign. First measurements were made of the thermal and mildly suprathermal (induced by ion cyclotron resonance heating) ion feature. The results confirmed expectations, indicating that the diagnostic should give the predicted performance for observation of α-particle populations in the DT phase. The signal-to-noise ratio is limited by the noise on the background radiation (electron cyclotron emission), which has a minimum around 140 GHz only when JET is operated at B∼3.4 T. To ...