UC Irvine

A fast-ion D -alpha (FIDA) diagnostic is under development for the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX). The FIDA technique is a charge-exchange recombination spectroscopy measurement that exploits the large Doppler shift of Balmer-alpha light from energetic hydrogenic atoms to infer the fast-ion density. The principal objective of the NSTX installation is to measure the transport of beam ions caused by fast-ion driven instabilities; detection of perpendicular acceleration of fast ions during high harmonic fast wave heating is another important goal. Recent data from a DIII-D FIDA diagnostic guide the design. The planned NSTX diagnostic consists of two separate instruments focusing on different aspects of the measurement. One instrument uses a transmission grating spectrometer to measure the perpendicular energy spectrum and the spatial profile every 10 ms; the anticipated resolution is ∼10 keV in energy and ∼5 cm in radius. A second instrument employs bandpass filters to detect fast-ion redistribution events with millisecond temporal resolution. © 2006 American Institute of Physics.