Can we study the transport of MeV ions without generating fusion alphas?

Conference poster, 2015

The novel ion cyclotron resonance heating method, utilizing three ion species, allows the generation of energetic trace minorities in the MeV range [Ye. O. Kazakov et al., 2015, Nucl. Fusion 55, 032001]. We survey which aspects of alpha particle transport may be accessed experimentally without D-T operation, such as during the non-activated phase of ITER, through a numerical investigation of the transport properties of RF heated 3He resonant ions in a 4He−H mixture plasma. The turbulent transport is simulated using the recently developed version of the gyrokinetic code GS2 that can handle strongly non-Maxwellian species [G. J. Wilkie et al., 2015, J. Plasma Phys. 81, 905810306], while the collisional transport is studied taking the temperature anisotropy of the 3He species into account.