Overview of recent experimental results on the EAST tokamak

Abstract

Since the 2021 IAEA FEC, EAST experiments have been carried out in support of high-performance steady-state operation and physics understanding for ITER and CFETR. The first demonstration of reproducible 403 s long-pulse steady-state H-mode plasma with H98y2>1.3, βP~2.5, βN~1.6, ne/nGW~0.7 and a good control of impurity and heat exhaust have been achieved on EAST using the pure radio frequency (RF) power heating and current drive. In support of ITER and CFETR long pulse operation, a thousand-second time scale (~1056 s) fully non-inductive plasma has been achieved. The EAST operational regime of high βP has been significantly extended (H98y2>1.3, βP~4.0, βN~2.4 and ne/nGW~1.0) using RF and neutral beam (NB). The full edge localized mode suppression using the n = 4 resonant magnetic perturbations (RMP) has been achieved in ITER-like standard type-I ELMy H-mode plasmas with q95 ≈ 3.1 on EAST, extrapolating favorably to the ITER baseline scenario. The sustained large ELM control and stable partial detachment have been achieved with Ne seeding. The plasma-beta effect for error field penetration is investigated with n = 1 RMP. Breakdown and plasma initiation at low toroidal electric fields (<0.3 V/m) with EC pre-ionization is developed. The transport and control of high-Z impurity of tungsten is investigated.