UC Irvine

We report the development of an improved optical tomography diagnostic which measures the velocity-space distribution of a laboratory plasma in two dimensions. The new device is capable of imaging plasma distributions over a wider range of magnetic fields and plasma column diameters than the previous design, while minimizing the risk of misdiagnosis due to perturbations caused by inserting the device in the plasma. Computer-aided control of the diagnostic allows a greater number of single-dimensional scans to be collected in a shorter amount of time, resulting in increased resolution of the reconstructed image while freeing up more time for the user to perform the experiment. Recent data using the new device are presented to show improvement of resolution gained by doubling the number of total scans. Finally, we present a method to identify velocity-space nonuniformities without the need to reconstruct a complete image.