A polarization-based Thomson scattering technique for burning plasmas

The traditional Thomson scattering diagnostic is based on measurement of the wavelength spectrum of scattered light, where electron temperature measurements are inferred from thermal broadening of the spectrum. At sufficiently high temperatures, especially those predicted for ITER and other burning plasmas, relativistic effects cause a change in the degree of polarization (P) of the scattered light; for fully polarized incident laser light, the scattered light becomes partially polarized. The resulting reduction of polarization is temperature dependent and has been proposed by other authors as a potential alternative to the traditional spectral decomposition technique. Following the previously developed Stokes vector approach, we analytically calculate the degree of polarization for incoherent Thomson scattering. For the first time, we obtain exact results valid for the full range of incident laser polarization states, scattering angles, and electron temperatures. While previous work focused only on linear polarization, we show that circularly polarized incident light optimizes the degree of depolarization for a wide range of temperatures relevant to burning plasmas. We discuss the feasibility of a polarization based Thomson scattering diagnostic for ITER-like plasmas with both linearly and circularly polarized light and compare to the traditional technique.