ICRF heating experiments on Alcator C-Mod

Routine high power operation of the ICRF heating system (up to 3.5 MW at 80 MHz) has enabled studies of enhanced confinement modes as well as high heat flux divertor experiments in the Alcator C-Mod tokamak with toroidal magnetic fields of up to 8 T. H-mode was routinely observed when the edge temperature exceeded a threshold value. Boronization has reduced the radiated power to approximately 30% of the input power, which had little effect on confinement of L-mode plasmas, but had a large impact on the performance of H-mode plasmas. It has become possible to achieve quasi-steady-state H-modes with H≃2 and βN≃1.5 simultaneously with Prad/Pin≃0.3 and Zeff≃1.5. PEP mode can be obtained with central ICRF heating combined with core fuelling by pellet injection. Because of the high central density, ion heating becomes the dominant heating channel during PEP mode. For direct electron heating schemes, such as heating by the mode converted ion Bernstein wave, the electron heating profile can be measured using the ...