Physical design and recent experimental results of the new ICRF antenna on EAST

Abstract

Two new ICRF antennas operating in the ion cyclotron radio frequency (ICRF) range have been developed for EAST to overcome the low coupling problem of the original antennas. The original ICRF antennas were limited in their power capacity due to insufficient coupling. The new antenna design takes into account both wave coupling and absorption processes through comprehensive wave coupling and absorption codes, with the dominant parallel wave number k_∥ of 7.5 m-1 at dipole phasing. Through the use of these new ICRF antennas, we are able to achieve 3.8 MW output power and 360 second operation, respectively. The initial experimental results demonstrate the reliability of the antenna design method.