Speaker
Description
In magnetically confined fusion plasmas, effective confinement of fast ions—produced by external heating systems and fusion reactions—is essential to ensure efficient plasma heating, current drive, and machine protection. To optimize fast-ion confinement, it is crucial to develop a comprehensive understanding of their interaction with plasma instabilities.
In this context, scintillator-based fast-ion loss detectors (FILDs) have proven to be a powerful diagnostic tool. FILDs provide direct measurements of the gyroradius and pitch angle of escaping fast ions, with high temporal resolution (up to the MHz range), enabling detailed studies of wave–particle interactions and the physical mechanisms driving fast-ion transport.
This contribution will present an overview of the measurement principles and design considerations of FILD diagnostics, as well as highlight key physics results obtained in devices such as ASDEX Upgrade, MAST Upgrade, and TCV. The prospects for FILD applications in future burning plasma experiments will be discussed.
