Particle confinement of pellet-fuelled H-mode plasmas in the Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This paper quantifies the particle confinement of pellet-fuelled plasmas in the Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak (MAST). The dataset is restricted mostly to neutral beam heated plasmas and to shallow pellets launched from the high field side. It is shown that the pellet deposition can be explained only by invoking the ∇B drift of the pellet ablatant. The pellet creates a zone with positive density gradient and increased temperature gradient. Simulations show that these changes could increase the level of micro-turbulence and thus enhance further the penetration of pellet-deposited particles towards the core. Post-pellet dynamics of the density profile is characterised by the pellet retention time τpel. It is shown that τpel correlates with the status of the edge transport barrier (L-mode or H-mode) and decreases rapidly for pellet deposition radius rpel approaching the plasma edge. For ELMy H-mode and ITER-like pellets, rpel ≈ 0.8a, the pellet retention time is about 20% of the energy confinement time. The fuelling requirement by the pellets for ITER is discussed.