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The active control of internal transport barriers (ITBs) is an important issue to achieve high performance plasma in a fusion reactor. A critical challenge of ITB control is to increase the ITB position. The ITBs with internal kink modes (IKMs), such as fishbone (FB) instability and long-live mode (LLM) with mode number of m / n = 1/1 are frequently observed on HL-2A tokamak in neutral beam heated discharges. The correlation of FB instability/LLM with ITBs is analyzed in order to extend the ITB radius. It has been revealed that FB instability and LLM are often excited after the ITB formation. Therefore, FB instability and LLM play no role in triggering ITBs on HL-2A tokamak. On the other hand, they may slow down the outward radial expansion and then shrink the foot position of ITB, and damp the gradient growth of ion temperature and rotation velocity. Since the perturbation of LLM is weaker than that of FB instability, the shrinking effect of ITB foot and braking effect on gradient growth are slighter than those of FB instability. Compared with the LLM, FB instability routinely appears in plasmas with lower density, higher heating power and lower plasma current. In addition, large ITBs without IKMs are also discussed on HL-2A tokamak. The large ITB is the largest one, the FB ITB is the strongest one and the LLM ITB is the widest one in three ITBs, where the ‘large’, ‘strong’ and ‘wide’ qualifications correspond to ITB position ρ ITB, the normalized temperature gradient R /LT, and its width W / a. Therefore, the large ITB position may be obtained if the IKMs are effectively controlled in a tokamak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 32/64-channel Charge eXchange Recombination Spectroscopy (CXRS) and a 7-channel motional Stark effect (MSE) polarimeter have been developed on the HL-2A tokamak. To extract the maximum time resolution of the system, the incidence fibers of the spectrometer are pitch-controlled; and the double-slit fiber bundle can increase the spatial channels with one charge-coupled device detector. The ion temperature and plasma rotation with time and spatial resolutions up to 5 ms and 1 cm are obtained. Sawtooth oscillation, transition from intermediate phase (I phase) to high confinement mode (H mode) can be clearly observed by the CXRS. The spectrometer can be utilized as the main component of the MSE polarimeter, which can effectively overcome the weak Stark effect. The pitch angles of magnetic field are obtained for 7 spatial points covering 24 cm along major radius with time resolution of 40 ms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physics related to fast ions in magnetically confined fusion plasmas is a very important issue, since these particles will play an important role in future burning plasmas. Indeed, they will act as primary heating source and will sustain the self-ignited condition. To measure the fast ion slowing-down times in a magnetohydrodynamic-quiescent plasmas in different scenarios, very short pulses of a deuterium neutral beam, so-called 'blip,' with duration of about 5 ms were tangentially co-injected into a deuterium plasmas at the HuanLiuqi-2A (commonly referred to as HL-2A) tokamak [L. W. Yan, Nucl. Fusion 51, 094016 (2011)]. The decay rate of 2.45 MeV D-D fusion neutrons produced by beam-plasma reactions following neutral beam termination was measured by means of a 235U fission chamber. Experimental results were compared with those predicted by a classical slowing-down model. These results show that the fast ions are well confined with a peaked profile and the ions are slowed down classically without significant loss in the HL-2A tokamak. Moreover, it has been observed that during electron cyclotron resonance heating the fast ions have a longer slowing-down time and the neutron emission rate decay time becomes longer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The operation conditions have been improved via developing new technologies and improving the hardware on HL-2A tokamak in recent years. The ECRH system has been upgraded to 3 MW/68 GHz, the supersonic molecular beam injection (SMBI) fuelling technique has been developed further, and clusters can be formed in the SMB by cooling the gas to around liquid nitrogen temperature, so that deeper penetration can be achieved. Moreover, there are about 30 kinds of diagnostics developed on HL-2A to measure the plasma parameters. These diagnostic systems include magnetics, microwave reflectometry, charge exchange recombination spectroscopy, Thomson scattering, FIR interferometer. Some of them were specially designed for the physics experiments. For example, a novel design of Langmuir probes was developed to study the 3-D structure of zonal flows. With these hardware development and improvement, new experimental results have been achieved in the fields of turbulence, transport, MHD instabilities, and energetic particle dynamics. In particular, the edge localized mode (ELM)y H-mode has been achieved by combining the auxiliary heating of NBI and ECRH, SMBI is beneficial for the L-H transition and the H-mode operation on HL-2A, and suitable for studying particle transport and controlling the ELMs during H-mode discharges due to its deep and local injection features and good controllability. In addition, the 3-D spectral structures of the low-frequency zonal flow and quasi-mode, which were predicted by theory and simulation, have been observed simultaneously. The beta-induced Alfvén eigenmodes (BAEs), excited by large magnetic islands (m-BAE) and by energetic electrons (e-BAE), are investigated, these phenomena are under further study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Small edge resonant magnetic perturbations are used to control the pedestal transport and stability in low electron collisionality (νe*), ITER [ITER Physics Basis Editors et al., Nucl. Fusion 39, 2137 (1999)] relevant, poloidally diverted plasmas. The applied perturbations reduce the height of the density pedestal and increase its width while increasing the height of the electron pedestal temperature and its gradient. The effect of the perturbations on the pedestal gradients is controlled by the current in the perturbation coil, the poloidal mode spectrum of the coil, the neutral beam heating power, and the divertor deuterium fueling rate. Large pedestal instabilities, referred to as edge localized modes (ELMs), are completely eliminated with radial magnetic perturbations (δbr(m/n)) at the q=m/n=11/3 surface exceeding δbr(11/3)B[lowercase_phi_synonym]-1=2.6×10-4, where B[lowercase_phi_synonym] is the toroidal magnetic field on axis. The resulting ELM-free H-mode plasmas have stationary densities and radiated power, are maintained in DIII-D for up to 2550 ms (17 energy confinement times), and are limited only by hardware constraints. It is found that changes caused by the magnetic perturbations in the pedestal profiles cannot be explained by a straightforward application of stochastic quasilinear diffusion theory due to the complex nature of the transport physics involved when boundary layer field lines connect regions of hot plasma directly to material surfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]