An assessment of full wave effects on the propagation and absorption of lower hybrid waves

Lower hybrid (LH) waves (Ωci ω Ωce, where Ωi,e ≡ Zi,eeB/mi,ec) have the attractive property of damping strongly via electron Landau resonance on relatively fast tail electrons and consequently are well-suited to driving current. Established modeling techniques use WKB expansions with self-consistent non-Maxwellian distributions. Higher order WKB expansions have shown some effects on the parallel wavenumber evolution and consequently on the damping due to diffraction A massively parallel version of the TORIC full wave electromagnetic field solver valid in the LH range of frequencies has been developed [J. in order to self-consistently evolve non-thermal electron distributions characteristic of LH current drive experiments in devices such as Alcator C-Mod and ITER (B0 ≈5 T, ne0 ≈ 1 × 10 20 m −3). These simulations represent the first ever self-consistent simulations of LHCD utilizing both a full wave and Fokker–Planck calculation in toroidal geometry.