In tokamak disruptions the Ohmic current is often replaced by a current of runaway electrons, which is likely to be more peaked in the centre of the discharge than the pre-disruption current. This raises the question of the resistive stability of the post-disruption plasma, where the equilibrium current is entirely carried by the runaway electrons while the cold (∼ 10 eV) background plasma is relatively resistive. It is found that the linear properties of the classical tearing mode are essentially determined by the cold bulk plasma, and the growth rate is approximately the same as in a plasma without runaways but with the same current profile. The nonlinear saturation amplitude is different however. In a symmetric plasma slab, the saturated island size is larger when the current is carried by runaway electrons than in the Ohmic case, and undergoes a nonlinear bifurcation when the stability index ∆ ′ exceeds a critical value.

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Since the installation of an ITER-like wall, the JET programme has focused on the consolidation of ITER design choices and the preparation for ITER operation, with a specific emphasis given to the bulk tungsten melt experiment, which has been crucial for the final decision on the material choice for the day-one tungsten divertor in ITER. Integrated scenarios have been progressed with the re-establishment of long-pulse, high-confinement H-modes by optimizing the magnetic configuration and the use of ICRH to avoid tungsten impurity accumulation. Stationary discharges with detached divertor conditions and small edge localized modes have been demonstrated by nitrogen seeding. The differences in confinement and pedestal behaviour before and after the ITER-like wall installation have been better characterized towards the development of high fusion yield scenarios in DT. Post-mortem analyses of the plasma-facing components have confirmed the previously reported low fuel retention obtained by gas balance and shown that the pattern of deposition within the divertor has changed significantly with respect to the JET carbon wall campaigns due to the absence of thermally activated chemical erosion of beryllium in contrast to carbon. Transport to remote areas is almost absent and two orders of magnitude less material is found in the divertor.

Abstract. Energy and pitch angle resolved measurements of highly energetic (megaelectronvolt range) suprathermal ions ejected from the plasma through interaction with fishbone oscillations are presented. The measurements are obtained with a 2-D scintillator probe diagnostic installed on JET, which is designed to detect lost ions only above a certain energy threshold (E min,D ∼ 200 keV). In the case reported here the lost ions are identified as fast protons which had been accelerated to high energies by ICRF minority heating. The energy of the lost protons (∼ 0.5-4 MeV) is approximately one order of magnitude higher than the energy of the injected beam ions (max. 130 keV) driving the fishbone. Losses arriving at the probe are enhanced by about a factor 10-20 with respect to MHD-quiescent levels, and are found to increase quadratically with the fishbone amplitude. Using a number of simplifying assumptions, numerical simulations have been performed which combine the HAGIS, MISHKA and SELFO codes (where the distribution function predicted by SELFO has been validated against NPA measurements). The losses are found to originate from orbit stochastic diffusion of trapped protons near the plasma boundary or from counter-passing protons deep in the plasma core which transit under the influence of the fishbone into an unconfined trapped orbit. The simulations show further that the losses are of nonresonant type. The simulated energy and pitch angle distribution of the losses, the ‡ See the Appendix of F. Romanelli et al., Proceedings of the 22nd IAEA Fusion Energy Conference, Geneva, Switzerland, 2008 MeV-range fast ion losses induced by fishbones on JET 2 temporal behaviour of the losses during a fishbone cycle and the scaling of the losses with the fishbone amplitude are compared with experiment. The simulation results are mostly in broad agreement with experiment, but some of the predictions could not be reconciled with experiment using this model.

We describe an experiment of atomic spectroscopy devoted to ascertaining whether the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of photons has the same property of interacting with atoms or molecules as occurs for the spin angular momentum (SAM). In our experiment, rubidium vapors are excited by means of laser radiation with different combinations of OAM and SAM, particularly selected to inhibit or enhance the fluorescence according to the selection rules for the electric dipole transitions between the fundamental state and the first excited doublet. Our results clearly show that an electric-dipole-type transition is insensitive to the OAM value, and provide an original validation of a problem long debated in theoretical works.

A synthetic diagnostic model for the simulation of energy and pitch angle resolved measurements of fast ion losses obtained by 2D scintillation-type detectors is presented and subsequently tested on a JET discharge with fishbones (previously documented in Perez von Thun et al 2010 Nucl. Fusion 50 084009). The simulated energy and pitch angle distributions at the detector are found to be in excellent agreement with the measurements. The simulations further suggest that nearly all the fast ion losses take place in the early growth phase of the fishbone cycle, and reach their maximum well ahead of the magnetic perturbation peak.

Three-dimensional (3D) investigations of the magnetic reconnection field topology in space and laboratory plasmas have identified the abidance of magnetic coherent structures in the stochastic region, which develop during the nonlinear stage of the reconnection process. Further analytical and numerical analyses highlighted the efficacy of some of these structures in limiting the magnetic transport. The question then arises as to what is the possible role played by these patterns in the dynamics of the plasma particles populating the chaotic region. In order to explore this aspect, we provide a detailed description of the nonlinear 3D magnetic field topology in a collisionless magnetic reconnection event with a strong guide field. In parallel, we study the evolution of a population of test electrons in the guiding-center approximation all along the reconnection process. In particular, we focus on the nonlinear spatial redistribution of the initially thermal electrons and show how the electron dynamics in the stochastic region depends on the sign and on the value of their velocities. While the particles with the highest positive speed populate the coherent current structures that survive in the chaotic sea, the presence of the manifolds calculated in the stochastic region defines the confinement area for the electrons with the largest negative velocity. These results stress the link between the magnetic topology and the electron motion and contribute to the overall picture of a non-stationary fluid magnetic reconnection description in a geometry proper to physical systems where the effects of the curvature can be neglected.

Abstract. The impact of fishbone oscillations onto a confined fast ion population is simulated for a JET plasma and benchmarked against experiment quantitatively with the help of neutron rate measurements. The transient drops in volume integrated neutron emission are found to be mainly caused by the spatial redistribution of the (neutral beam injected) fast ion population confined in the plasma rather than by fast ion loss. The simulations yield a quadratic dependence of the neutron drop on the fishbone amplitude.It is found that the simulations are able to correctly reproduce the magnitude of the experimentally observed drop in volume integrated neutron emission to within a factor 2. Furthermore, frequency chirping is found to be important. Omitting the fishbone frequency chirp in the simulations reduces the magnitude of the neutron rate drop (and hence fast ion redistribution) to about half its original value.