MHD MAGNETIC FLUCTUATION MEASUREMENTS USING A HEAVY-ION BEAM PROBE

This paper describes a technique for measuring magnetic fluctuations using a heavy ion beam probe (HIBP) and presents the results of the first experiment to measure locally the internal magnetic structure of MHD modes in a hot, tokamak plasma. In these experiments on the TEXT tokamak, the toroidal position of the HIBP beam at the detector is used to measure the toroidal component of the magnetic vector potential fluctuations, Ãφ, at a localized position in the plasma. In an axisymmetric system a purely local measurement is possible. However, the detection method employed and the asymmetries in the tokamak introduce path effects. The importance of the path effects is estimated through numerical simulations of the experiment, and it is found that in this experiment the path effects are small throughout much of the plasma. In addition, toroidal asymmetries reduce the signal amplitude, but do not greatly distort the radial profile. The accuracy of the numerical simulations and detection technique is tested in a plasma with a known Ãφ, with agreement obtained to within 5%.