Turbulence reduction and poloidal shear steepening in reversed shear plasmas investigated by light scattering on Tore Supra

Infrared light scattering is used to characterize turbulence during reversed shear scenario obtained by a fast current ramp-up on Tore Supra [Hoang et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 4593 (2000)]. The preformed hollow profile is freezed using ion cyclotron resonance minority heating (ICRH). Turbulence intensity is recorded to dramatically decrease during the ramp-up and to recover smoothly as the discharge is ended. Simultaneously, a confinement improvement of about 40% is achieved for about 2 s. Although the diagnostic performs a line average and the measurement is dominated by turbulence at the edge, we show that the core behavior can be deduced. Core turbulence decrease is in agreement with the effective heat diffusivity behavior. With the same optical device, the radial electric shear is deduced from the frequency spectra Doppler shift. Turbulence reduction is thus demonstrated to be correlated with the E x B shear steepening. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics. [DOI: 10.1063/1.1330202].