Benchmarking the OLGA lower-hybrid full-wave code for a future integration with ALOHA.

The ALOHA [1] code is frequently used as a standard to solve the coupling of lower hybrid grills to the plasma. To remove its limitations on the linear density profile, homogeneous magnetic field and the fully decoupled fast and slow waves in the determination of the plasma surface admittance, we exploit the recently developed efficient full wave code OLGA [2]. There is simple connection between these two codes, namely, the plasma surface admittances used in ALOHA-2D can be expressed as the slowly varying parts of the coupling element integrands in OLGA and the ALOHA coupling elements are then linear combinations of OLGA coupling elements. We developed AOLGA module (subset of OLGA) for ALOHA. An extensive benchmark has been performed. ALOHA admittances differ from AOLGA results mainly for N in the inaccessible region but the coupling elements differ only slightly. We compare OLGA and ALOHA for a simple 10-waveguide grill operating at 3.7 GHz and the linear density profile as it is used in ALOHA. Hence we can detect pure effects of fast and slow waves coupling on grill efficiency. The effects are weak for parameters near the optimum coupling and confirm the ALOHA results validity. We also compare the effect of the plasma surface density and the density gradient on the grill coupling determined by OLGA and ALOHA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]