Characterization of plasma current quench at JET

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

Eddy currents generated during the fastest disruption current decays represent the most severe design condition for medium and small size in-vessel components of most tokamaks. Best-fit linear and instantaneous plasma current quench rates have been extracted for a set of recent JET disruptions. Contrary to expectations, the current quench rate spectrum of high and low thermal energy disruptions is not substantially different. For most of the disruptions with the highest instantaneous current quench rate an exponential fit of the early phase of the current decay provides a more accurate estimate of the maximum current decay velocity. However, this fit is only suitable to model the fastest events, for which the current quench is dominated by radiation losses rather than the plasma motion.