Particle losses due to RF-enhanced pitch-angle scattering into velocity space loss regions

Abstract

The application of RF heating (ICRH or LHH) to a fusion plasma creates high-energy tails on the distribution function of the heated particle species. In the presence of loss regions in velocity space, e. g. due to particle drifts in the toroidal magnetic field ripple of a tokamak, the collisional pitch-angle scattering losses may be significantly enhanced. The present work assesses the importance of such RF-enhanced losses and explicit expressions are derived for the evolution of the loss fraction. In particular, for parameters typical of PLT we find that the loss fraction could rapidly reach high values.