FUSION PLASMA-EXPERIMENTS ON TFTR - A 20 YEAR RETROSPECTIVE

The Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) (R. J. Hawryluk, to be publishe d in Rev. Mod. Phys.) experiments on high-temperature plasmas, that cu lminated in the study of deuterium-tritium D-T plasmas containing sign ificant populations of energetic alpha particles, spanned over two dec ades from conception to completion. During the design of TFTR, the key physics issues were magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equilibrium and stabili ty, plasma energy transport, impurity effects, and plasma reactivity. Energetic particle physics was given less attention during this phase because, in part, of the necessity to address the issues that would cr eate the conditions for the study of energetic particles and also the lack of diagnostics to study the energetic particles in detail. The wo rldwide tokamak program including the contributions from TFTR made sub stantial progress during the past two decades in addressing the fundam ental issues affecting the performance of high-temperature plasmas and the behavior of energetic particles. The progress has been the result of the construction of new facilities, which enabled the production o f high-temperature well-confined plasmas, development of sophisticated diagnostic techniques to study both the background plasma and the res ulting energetic fusion products, and computational techniques to both interpret the experimental results and to predict the outcome of expe riments. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics.