Several seemingly unrelated effects in Alcator C-Mod Ohmic L-mode plasmas are shown to be closely connected: non-local heat transport, core toroidal rotation reversals, energy confinement saturation and up/down impurity density asymmetries. These phenomena all abruptly transform at a critical value of the collisionality. At low densities in the linear Ohmic confinement regime, with collisionality ν * ≤ 0.35 (evaluated inside of the q=3/2 surface), heat transport exhibits non-local behavior, core toroidal rotation is directed co-current, edge impurity density profiles are up/down symmetric and a turbulent feature in core density fluctuations with k θ up to 15 cm −1 (k θ ρ s ∼ 1) is present. At high density/collisionality with saturated Ohmic confinement, electron thermal transport is diffusive, core rotation is in the counter-current direction, edge impurity density profiles are up/down asymmetric and the high k θ turbulent feature is absent. The rotation reversal stagnation point (just inside of the q=3/2 surface) coincides with the non-local electron temperature profile inversion radius. All of these observations can be unified in a model with trapped electron mode prevalence at low collisionality and ion temperature gradient mode domination at high collisionality.

We report the observation of a correlation between shear Alfvén eigenmode activity and electron transport in plasma regimes where the electron temperature gradient is flat, and thus the drive for temperature gradient microinstabilities is absent. Plasmas having rapid central electron transport show intense, broadband global Alfvén eigenmode (GAE) activity in the 0.5-1.1 MHz range, while plasmas with low transport are essentially GAE-free. The first theoretical assessment of a GAE-electron transport connection indicates that overlapping modes can resonantly couple to the bulk thermal electrons and induce their stochastic diffusion.

With fusion device performance hinging on the edge pedestal pressure, it is imperative to experimentally understand the physical mechanism dictating the pedestal characteristics and to validate and improve pedestal predictive models. This Letter reports direct evidence of density and magnetic fluctuations showing the stiff onset of an edge instability leading to the saturation of the pedestal on the Alcator C-Mod tokamak. Edge stability analyses indicate that the pedestal is unstable to both ballooning mode and kinetic ballooning mode in agreement with observations.

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This research describes advancements in the spectral analysis and error propagation techniques associated with x-ray imaging crystal spectroscopy (XICS) that have enabled this diagnostic to be used to accurately constrain particle, momentum, and heat transport studies in a tokamak for the first time. Doppler tomography techniques have been extended to include propagation of statistical uncertainty due to photon noise, the effect of non-uniform instrumental broadening as well as flux surface variations in impurity density. These methods have been deployed as a suite of modeling and analysis tools, written in interactive data language (IDL) and designed for general use on tokamaks. Its application to the Alcator C-Mod XICS is discussed, along with novel spectral and spatial calibration techniques. Example ion temperature and radial electric field profiles from recent I-mode plasmas are shown, and the impact of poloidally asymmetric impurity density and natural line broadening is discussed in the context of the planned ITER x-ray crystal spectrometer.

Results from the investigation of neoclassical core transport and the role of the radial electric field profile (E r) in the first operational phase of the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator are presented. In stellarator plasmas, the details of the E r profile are expected to have a strong effect on both the particle and heat fluxes. Investigation of the radial electric field is important in understanding neoclassical transport and in validation of neoclassical calculations. The radial electric field is closely related to the perpendicular plasma flow (u ⊥) through the force balance equation. This allows the radial electric field to be inferred from measurements of the perpendicular flow velocity, which can be measured using the x-ray imaging crystal spectrometer (XICS) and correlation reflectometry diagnostics. Large changes in the perpendicular rotation, on the order of ∆u ⊥ ∼ 5 km/s (∆E r ∼ 12 kV /m), have been observed within a set of experiments where the heating power was stepped down from 2 M W to 0.6 M W. These experiments are examined in detail to explore the relationship between heating power, temperature and density profiles and the radial electric field. Finally the inferred E r profiles are compared to initial neoclassical calculations using measured plasma profiles. The results from several neoclassical codes, sfincs, fortec-3d and dkes, are compared both with each other and the measurements. These comparisons show good agreement, giving confidence in the applicability of the neoclassical calculations to the W7-X configuration.

Core impurity transport has been investigated for a variety of confinement regimes in Alcator C-Mod plasmas from x-ray emission following injection of medium and high Z materials. In Ohmic L-mode discharges, impurity transport is anomalous (D eff ≫ D nc ) and changes very little across the LOC/SOC boundary. In ICRF heated Lmode plasmas, the core impurity confinement time decreases with increasing ICRF input power (and subsequent increasing electron temperature) and increases with plasma current. Nearly identical impurity confinement characteristics are observed in I-mode plasmas. In EDA H-mode discharges the core impurity confinement times are much longer. There is a strong connection between core impurity confinement time and the edge density gradient across all confinement regimes studied here. Deduced central impurity density profiles in stationary plasmas are generally flat, in spite of large amplitude sawtooth oscillations, and there is little evidence of impurity convection inside of r/a = 0.3 when averaged over sawteeth.

We report on the simulations of recently observed correlations of the core electron transport with the sub-thermal ion cyclotron frequency instabilities in low aspect ratio plasmas of the National Spherical Torus Experiment. In order to model the electron transport the guiding centre code ORBIT is employed. A spectrum of test functions of multiple core localized global shear Alfvén eigenmode (GAE) instabilities based on a previously developed theory and experimental observations is used to examine the electron transport properties. The simulations exhibit thermal electron transport induced by electron drift orbit stochasticity in the presence of multiple core localized GAE.