Midplane Faraday rotation: A tokamak densitometer

The density in a tokamak can be determined by measuring the Faraday rotation of a laser directed tangent to the toroidal field. If there is a horizontal array of such beams, then ne(R) can be readily obtained with a simple Abel inversion about the center line of the tokamak. For a large machine, such as ITER, TPX, or JT-60, a 10.6 μm laser would be appropriate. If the machine operated at a full field of 10–50 T m and a peak density of 2.5×1020/m3, the rotation angle would be quite large—about 15°–75° per pass. An elegant measurement system can be made up from a single laser beam diffracted off a moving grating to form a fan of ∼10 probe beams. With the addition of a few optical components to the system, the return beams can be recombined and sent to a single detector. In the detector there is a separate frequency component for both the right and left hand component of each ray. These can be separated electronically to provide a reference and probe signal for each ray; the difference in phase between the two signals is twice the Faraday rotation angle.