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The ICRF system at the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak is in operation since May 1992. Following some modifications of which the major one was the installation of 3 dB couplers it has become a reliable additional heating system. The maximum power coupled into the plasma has been raised up to 7.2 MW (90% of the installed RF power) for short pulses and up to 6.2 MW for pulses several second long with energy of up to 29 MJ. A power of 5 MW is delivered on a regular basis to replace two NBI sources.

A newly designed ten channel microwave interferometer for line integrated electron density measurements at the experiment W7-AS stellarator is described. The probing signals in the frequency range of 160–162 GHz are generated by Gunn oscillators with subsequent frequency doublers. Double conversion heterodyne receivers with 2 MHz bandwidth are used for detection. All oscillators involved are phase locked. Use of each Gunn oscillator is twofold: as a source for the probing signal and as a local oscillator for heterodyne detection. The dynamic range of the millimeter wave part is about 70 dB. The instrument operates up to a peak density of 7×1019 m−3 with a temporal resolution of 5 μs. This article gives a detailed technical description of the system and demonstrates its usefulness by means of an experimental example.

This paper is a summary of some of the major results from the Wendelstein 7-AS stellarator (W7-AS). W7-AS [G. Grieger et al., Phys. Fluids B 4, 2081 (1992)] has demonstrated the feasibility of modular coils and has pioneered the island divertor and the modeling of its three-dimensional characteristics with the EMC3/EIRENE code [Y. Feng, F. Sardei et al., Plasma Phys. Controlled Fusion 44, 611 (2002)]. It has extended the operational range to high density (4×1020m−3 at 2.5T) and high ⟨β⟩ (3.4% at 0.9T); it has demonstrated successfully the application of electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH) beyond cutoff via electron Bernstein wave heating, and it has utilized the toroidal variation of the magnetic field strength for ion cyclotron resonance frequency beach-wave heating. In preparation of W7-X [J. Nuhrenberg et al., Trans. Fusion Technol. 27, 71 (1995)], aspects of the optimization concept of the magnetic design have been successfully tested. W7-AS has accessed the H-mode, the first time in a “non-to...