Path integral effects in heavy ion beam probe density measurements: A comparison of simulation results and experimental data

The heavy ion beam probe (HIBP) signal used to measure local density fluctuations in a plasma is also sensitive to modulation due to density fluctuations along the entire beam trajectory. A modulation model of the HIBP experiment on the Texas experimental tokamak (TEXT) is presented. The model includes profile information for equilibrium and fluctuating parameters, allows for differences in the radial and poloidal characteristics of the fluctuations, and uses realistic beam trajectories. It is shown that profile effects are important in understanding HIBP modulation and that modulation does not simply increase with line average density in TEXT. In addition, calculations of the modulation effects show that only the terms which correspond to in-phase signals at the two sample volumes are significant. Therefore, the modulation effects can be approximated with a real parameter. Under these assumptions, it is shown that only long correlation length, low wave number modes will contribute significantly to the corruption of the measured signal. The calculation of the modulation effects are consistent with the experiment. It is illustrated herein how the measured data can be used to set limits on the modulation signal without doing extensive model calculations. These limits show that there must be long wavelength fluctuations in the plasma.