Abstract
Perkins et al. PRL 2012 [1] reported unexpected power losses during High Harmonic Fast Wave (HHFW) heating and current drive in NSTX. Recently, Tierens et al [2] proposed that these losses may be attributable to surface waves on field-aligned plasma filaments, which carry power along the filaments, to be lost at the endpoints where the filaments intersect the limiters. In this work, we show that there is indeed a resonant loss mechanism associated with the excitation of these surface waves, and derive an analytic expression for the power lost to surface wave modes at each filament.
Modeling of Fast Wave Current Drive Experiments on DIII-D