English

Runaway electron current reconstitution after a non-axisymmetric magnetohydrodynamic flush

Plasma Physics 2022-11-07 v1

Abstract

Benign termination of mega-ampere (MA) level runaway current has been convincingly demonstrated in recent JET and DIII-D experiments, establishing it as a leading candidate for runaway mitigation on ITER. This comes in the form of a runaway flush by parallel streaming loss along stochastic magnetic field lines formed by global magnetohydrodynamic instabilities, which are found to correlate with a low-Z injection that purges the high-Z impurities from a post-thermal-quench plasma. Here we show the competing physics that govern the post-flush reconstitution of the runaway current in a ITER-like reactor where significantly higher current is expected. The trapped ``runaways'' are found to dominate the seeding for runaway reconstitution, and the incomplete purge of high-Z impurities helps drain the seed but produces a more efficient avalanche, two of which compete to produce a 2-3~MA step in current drop before runaway reconstitution of the plasma current.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.02160,
  title  = {Runaway electron current reconstitution after a non-axisymmetric magnetohydrodynamic flush},
  author = {Christopher J. McDevitt and Xian-Zhu Tang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.02160},
  year   = {2022}
}