A wide range of experiments is now being carried out, following a short break in operations for maintenance of sliding joints in the Torodial Field circuit, exploiting the high neutral beam heating power now available. These include joint experiments with other tokamaks to address important physics issues for ITER (German and US scientists have participated in these). The first microwave assisted plasma start-up experiments at 28GHz have yielded promising results. Other on-going experiments include energy confinement scaling with plasma current and power, neutral beam current drive studies at higher power, fuelling using pellet injection, edge physics studies, control of edge instabilities (ELMs) using error field compensation coils, and high plasma pressure studies.
New data are now being obtained from the Compact Neutral Particle Analyzer (CNPA) on loan from IPP Greifswald (Germany). The CNPA was designed and built at the Ioffe Institute, St. Petersburg, and provides information on the ion energy distribution in the plasma.
Recruitment of additional physicists for MAST is well underway. One of the MAST PhD students has been recruited to work on Thomson scattering systems and interviews for the remaining positions are presently taking place. A new Culham Fusion Research Fellow, who did his PhD studies on TEXTOR in Germany, has joined the MAST team.
Preparations are being made for the forthcoming engineering break, due to start on 23rd July. |
