Impact of beam ions on α-particle measurements by collective Thomson scattering in ITER

Collective Thomson scattering (CTS) has been proposed as a viable diagnostic for characterizing fusion born α-distributions in ITER. However, the velocities of the planned 1 MeV deuterium heating beam ions in ITER are similar to that of fusion born α-particles and may therefore mask the measurements of the fusion products. We apply a new technique for calculating the orbit averaged source, 〈S〉, of beam ions for various ITER scenarios. With the known 〈S〉 Fokker–Planck modelling is applied to characterize the beam ions during the slowing down process. Theoretical CTS signals for both beam ions and the α-particles are calculated. Our investigations show that the CTS measurements of α-particles will not be masked by the presence of the beam ions in H-mode plasmas. In lower density reversed shear plasmas, only a part of the CTS α-particle spectrum will be perturbed.