Deconvolution-based correction of alkali beam emission spectroscopy density profile measurements

Journal article, 2009

A deconvolution-based correction method of the beam emission spectroscopy (BES) density profile measurement is demonstrated by its application to simulated measurements of the COMPASS and TEXTOR tokamaks. If the line of sight is far from tangential to the flux surfaces, and the beam width is comparable to the scale length on which the light profile varies, the observation may cause an undesired smoothing of the light profile, resulting in a non-negligible underestimation of the calculated density profile. This effect can be reduced significantly by the emission reconstruction method, which gives an estimate of the emissivity along the beam axis from the measured light profile, taking the finite beam width and the properties of the measurement into account in terms of the transfer function of the observation. Characteristics and magnitude of the mentioned systematic error and its reduction by the introduced method are studied by means of the comprehensive alkali BES simulation code RENATE.