Lower Hybrid Current Drive Effects on HT-7 Superconducting Tokamak

Lower hybrid current drive (LHCD) experiments have been done on the superconducting Tokamak HT-7 by using a new developed long pulse megawatt lower hybrid wave system. An LHCD efficiency of 0.5 x 10¹⁹A.m^-2/W in a pulse length of several hundreds of milliseconds has been achieved. After boronization of the tokamak vacuum vessel, considerable improvements of plasma energy confinement and particle confinement during LHCD phase have been achieved by adjusting wave spectra. An energy transfer from the lower hybrid wave to plasma bulk electrons has been demonstrated experimentally. A computer simulation of the LHCD experiments by using a ray tracing code combined with a two dimensional Fokker-Planck code is in good accordance with experimental measurements and suggests an important role of plasma current profile.