Tan Mingsheng, Stone Douglas R, Triana Joseph C, Almagri Abdulgader F, Fiksel Gennady, Ding Weixing, Sarff John S, McCollam Karsten J, Li Hong, Liu Wandong
CAS Key Laboratory of Geospace Environment and Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, People's Republic of China.
Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA.
Rev Sci Instrum. 2017 Feb;88(2):023502. doi: 10.1063/1.4975095.
A 40-channel capacitive probe has been developed to measure the electrostatic fluctuations associated with the tearing modes deep into Madison Symmetric Torus (MST) reversed field pinch plasma. The capacitive probe measures the ac component of the plasma potential via the voltage induced on stainless steel electrodes capacitively coupled with the plasma through a thin annular layer of boron nitride (BN) dielectric (also serves as the particle shield). When bombarded by the plasma electrons, BN provides a sufficiently large secondary electron emission for the induced voltage to be very close to the plasma potential. The probe consists of four stalks each with ten cylindrical capacitors that are radially separated by 1.5 cm. The four stalks are arranged on a 1.3 cm square grid so that at each radial position, there are four electrodes forming a square grid. Every two adjacent radial sets of four electrodes form a cube. The fluctuating electric field can be calculated by the gradient of the plasma potential fluctuations at the eight corners of the cube. The probe can be inserted up to 15 cm (r/a = 0.7) into the plasma. The capacitive probe has a frequency bandwidth from 13 Hz to 100 kHz, amplifier-circuit limit, sufficient for studying the tearing modes (5-30 kHz) in the MST reversed-field pinch.
