In W 7-AS the H mode has been observed for the first time in a currentless stellarator plasma. H modes are achieved with 0.4 MW electron cyclotron resonance heating at 140 GHz at high density. The H phases display all characteristics known from tokamak H modes including edge localized modes (ELMs). The achievement of the H mode in a shear-free stellarator without toroidal current has consequences on //-mode transition and ELM theories.

Spectra of helium hydride were observed after neutralization of a mass-selected HeH+ beam. The molecules were produced in a fast beam, and so a special setup had to be used to avoid Doppler broadening and a careful calibration procedure had to be applied to determine the line positions and linewidths. In an earlier paper, we reported the first observation of a discrete spectrum of helium hydride, which was discovered by means of an emission band near 8000 Å. In this paper, a detailed analysis of this band for all four stable isotopic mixtures is given. For the deuterides several vibrational bands were observed, which allowed equilibrium molecular constants to be determined. These constants agree with the results of recent ab initio calculations. The similarity of these constants to those of HeH+ in the ground state confirms that the observed states are Rydberg states. Comparison of the molecular constants for different isotopic mixtures shows deviations from the Born–Oppenheimer approximation. Born–Oppenheimer breakdown parameters were derived. Both the upper and lower states show predissociation to the repulsive ground state of helium hydride. The line intensities give evidence of a dependence of the electronic transition moment on the interatomic distance.

The first plasma experiments on the W7AS advanced stellarator were conjuctea in October 1988, after magnetic surface mapping. The characteristics of the device &re described. During the first phase of operation, 70 GHz ECF was used to geneTate and heat a "currentless" plasma which was maintained in quasi-steady state for typically 0.5 s. Effects of the magnetic configuration on the confinement and measures to deal with the observed plasma current (bootstrap current and ECF-driven current) were investigated. Preliminary results of transport analysis are presented and compared with predictions of transport models.

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KEEN waves are non-stationary, nonlinear, self-organized asymptotic states in Vlasov plasmas. They lie outside the precepts of linear theory or perturbative analysis, unlike electron plasma waves or ion acoustic waves. Steady state, nonlinear constructs such as BGK modes also do not apply. The range in velocity that is strongly perturbed by KEEN waves depends on the amplitude and duration of the ponderomotive force generated by two crossing laser beams, for instance, used to drive them. Smaller amplitude drives manage to devolve into multiple highly-localized vorticlets, after the drive is turned off, and may eventually succeed to coalesce into KEEN waves. Fragmentation once the drive stops, and potential eventual remerger, is a hallmark of the weakly driven cases. A fully formed (more strongly driven) KEEN wave has one dominant vortical core. But it also involves fine scale complex dynamics due to shedding and merging of smaller vortical structures with the main one. Shedding and merging of vorticlets are involved in either case, but at different rates and with different relative importance. The narrow velocity range in which one must maintain sufficient resolution in the weakly driven cases, challenges fixed velocity grid numerical schemes. What is needed is the capability of resolving locally in velocity while maintaining a coarse grid outside the highly perturbed region of phase space. We here report on a new Semi-Lagrangian Vlasov-Poisson solver based on conservative non-uniform cubic splines in velocity that tackles this problem head on. An additional feature of our approach is the use of a new high-order time-splitting scheme which allows much longer simulations per computational effort. This is needed for low amplitude runs. There, global coherent structures take a long time to set up, such as KEEN waves, if they do so at all. The new code's performance is compared to uniform grid simulations and the advantages are quantified. The birth pains associated with weakly driven KEEN waves are captured in these simulations. Canonical KEEN waves with ample drive are also treated using these advanced techniques. They will allow the efficient simulation of KEEN waves in multiple dimensions, which will be tackled next, as well as generalizations to Vlasov-Maxwell codes. These are essential for pursuing the impact of KEEN waves in high energy density plasmas and in inertial confinement fusion applications. More generally, one needs a fully-adaptive gridin-phase-space method which could handle all small vorticlet dynamics whether pealing off or remerging. Such fully adaptive grids would have to be computed sparsely in order to be viable. This two-velocity grid method is a concrete and fruitful step in that direction.PACS. PACS-key 52.65.Ff Plasma simulation: Fokker-Planck and Vlasov equation a A part of this work was carried out using the HELIOS supercomputer system at