UC Irvine

The radial flux of 10 keV neutrals from the Asdex-Upgrade tokamak has been interpreted as a diagnostic of the radial electric field Er near the plasma edge (Herrmann W and Asdex-Upgrade Team 1995 Phys. Rev. Lett. 75 4401), with the conclusion that Er changes gradually at a transition from the L-mode confinement regime to the H-mode regime. In contrast to the Asdex-Upgrade results, a similar installation on the DIII-D tokamak finds no measurable signal in H-mode plasmas with deep Er wells. Measurable signals only occur in plasmas with relatively large pitch-angle scattering rates at the plasma edge (or with anomalous beam-ion confinement). Large scattering rates require a large electron temperature and are invariably accompanied by deep ripple wells. The results suggest an alternative explanation for the gradual evolution of the neutral-particle signal from Asdex-Upgrade: as the H-mode pedestal develops, more beam ions are pitch-angle scattered into the phase space measured by the detector.