Pitts, R.A., W. Fundamenski, S.K. Erents, Y. Andrew, A. Loarte, C. Silva and JET-EFDA contributers

There is an increasing body of evidence that the energy lost from diverted tokamak plasmas due to edge localized mode (ELM) activity may not be confined solely to deposition on divertor components. Plasma-facing surfaces in the main confinement chamber also appear to intercept significant fluxes. Whilst this is of no practical consequence for the operation of present day facilities, concerns are being raised over the possible impact on future devices, in which ELMs carrying higher energies are expected. A key parameter required in this assessment is the energy transported by ions in the ELM as it moves through the scrape-off layer (SOL). This contribution presents the first known direct experimental demonstration that ELM events can convect ions with considerable energies to regions in the far SOL. These measurements, obtained on the JET tokamak with an ion energy analyser probe, are combined with a recently developed SOL transient model to show that the ions can, indeed, reach first limiting surfaces with energies that are a considerable fraction (∼50%) of those found in the H-mode edge pedestal region. This experiment– theory comparison supports a picture of the ELM in which filaments of hot plasma originating in the pedestal
region dissipate energy primarily through parallel losses to the divertor targets during their radial propagation across the SOL.