Hydrogen isotope effects on ITG scale length, pedestal and confinement in JT-60 H-mode plasmas

Abstract

The dependence of heat transport, edge pedestal and confinement on isotopic composition was investigated in conventional H-mode plasmas. Identical profiles for the electron density, electron temperature and ion temperature were obtained for hydrogen and deuterium plasmas, whereas the required power clearly increased for hydrogen, which resulted in a reduction in heat diffusivity for deuterium. The determination of identical temperature profiles, despite the different heating power, suggested that the characteristics of heat conduction essentially differ for hydrogen and deuterium, even at the same scale length of temperature gradient. The self-regulating physics mechanism determining the overall H-mode confinement was also addressed. The inverse of the ion temperature gradient (ITG) scale length, or ∇Ti/Ti, which is required for a given ion heat diffusivity, increased by a factor of approximately 1.2 for deuterium compared with that for hydrogen. The relationship between edge pedestal pressure and global βp holds true consistently regardless of the difference in the isotopic composition. A higher value of βp was obtained for deuterium because of its smaller ITG scale length and because of the additional stored energy in the thermal and fast ion components, the latter due to an increase in the slowing down time with an increase in isotopic mass.