Fast wave direct electron heating in advanced inductive and ITER baseline scenario discharges in DIII-D

Fast Wave (FW) heating and electron cyclotron heating (ECH) are used in the DIII-D tokamak to study plasmas with low applied torque and dominant electron heating characteristic of burning plasmas. FW heating via direct electron damping has reached the 2.5 MW level in high performance ELMy H-mode plasmas. In Advanced Inductive (AI) plasmas, core FW heating was found to be comparable to that of ECH, consistent with the excellent first-pass absorption of FWs predicted by ray-tracing models at high electron beta. FW heating at the ∼2 MW level to ELMy H-mode discharges in the ITER Baseline Scenario (IBS) showed unexpectedly strong absorption of FW power by injected neutral beam (NB) ions, indicated by significant enhancement of the D-D neutron rate, while the intended absorption on core electrons appeared rather weak. The AI and IBS discharges are compared in an effort to identify the causes of the different response to FWs