Neutral beam dump with cathodic arc titanium gettering

An incomplete neutral beam capture can degrade the plasma performance in neutral beam driven plasma machines. The beam dumps mitigating the shine-through beam recycling must entrap and retain large particle loads while maintaining the beam-exposed surfaces clean of the residual impurities. The cathodic arc gettering, which provides high evaporation rate coupled with a fast time response, is a powerful and versatile technique for depositing clean getter films in vacuum. A compact neutral beam dump utilizing the titanium arc gettering was developed for a field-reversed configuration plasma sustained by 1 MW, 20-40 keV neutral hydrogen beams. The titanium evaporator features a new improved design. The beam dump is capable of handling large pulsed gas loads, has a high sorption capacity, and is robust and reliable. With the beam particle flux density of 5 x 10(17) H/(cm(2) s) sustained for 3-10 ms, the beam recycling coefficient, defined as twice the ratio of the hydrogen molecular flux leaving the beam dump to the incident flux of high-energy neutral atoms, is similar to 0.7. The use of the beam dump allows us to significantly reduce the recycling of the shine-through neutral beam as well as to improve the vacuum conditions in the machine. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3545842]