Oulfa Chellaï receives the best poster prize
Oulfa Chellaï © Y. Martin, EPFL, 2017
The international program committee of the conference on radiofrequency power in plasmas handed the best student poster award to Oulfa Chellaï for her outstanding experimental study of the effect of turbulence on the propagation of microwaves at the edge of fusion plasmas.
The award-winning poster summarized the work undertaken by Oulfa Chellaï and her European colleagues in the frame of an EUROfusion 'Enabling Research' project. The work consisted in measuring the diffusion of a microwave beam propagating inside a plasma. To do this, she designed a series of experiments on different installations including the TCV tokamak. In this case, she used the microwave beam dedicated to plasma heating and measured its expansion using Langmuir probes located on the opposite wall. She has also been able to measure the amplitude of the fluctuations generated by the turbulence along the trajectory of the microwave beam.
It is particularly useful to know this diffusion since this type of microwave will be intensively used in large fusion devices such as ITER to neutralize the zones of instabilities which are well localized inside the plasma. However, the microwaves must first pass through an area of turbulence since it is located at the edge of the plasma. It is therefore necessary to know the effect of the turbulence on the microwaves in order to focus the latter at the desired location.
