The wave number spectrum (one-dimensional spectrum) of electrostatic potential fluctuations at sub-Larmor scales was measured in two-dimensional (2D) electrostatic turbulence in laboratory magnetized plasma. The spectrum at scales k([perpendicular])ρ(i)>1, where k([perpendicular]) and ρ(i) are the fluctuation wave number perpendicular to the magnetic field and ion Larmor radius, respectively, supports the existence of the k(-10/3) inertial range of the entropy cascade induced by nonlinear phase mixing. This indicates agreement with a theoretical prediction [A. A. Schekochihin et al., Plasma Phys. Controlled Fusion 50, 124024 (2008)] and the result of a 2D gyrokinetic simulation [T. Tatsuno et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 015003 (2009)]. The cutoff wave numbers of the spectrum, above which the entropy cascade is smeared by collisions, observed in this experiment were consistent with those in the theory.

We report the first experimental identification of the new wave branch at electron cyclotron frequency produced by the injection of a frequency-matched intense pump wave in magnetized plasma [A. G. Litvak and M. D. Tokman, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 095003 (2002); G. Shvets and J. S. Wurtele, Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 115003 (2002)], which is a classical phenomenon analogous to electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in quantum systems. By using a frequency-sweep interferometer, we directly detected the dispersion relation of the plasma EIT branch for propagation parallel to the background magnetic field. The bandwidth of the EIT window was correlated with the pump-wave electric field and was found to agree with the theoretical prediction.

This study derives the electric susceptibility tensor of a cold magnetized plasma under electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) regime Tokman 2002 Phys. Rev. Lett. 88 095003, Shvets and Wurtele 2002 Phys. Rev. Lett. 89 115003) in which an intense right-hand circularly polarized pump wave is injected parallel to the background magnetic field. A dispersion relation of the wave in the electron cyclotron frequency range for an arbitrary propagation angle is obtained from this susceptibility tensor. In the case of purely parallel propagation of the probe wave, the dispersion relation obtained by Litvak, Shvets and others is recaptured. A new finding is that a stop band emerges between left-hand cutoff and upper hybrid frequencies, in which originally an extraordinary-mode (X) branch exists, in the case of perpendicular propagation to the background magnetic field under the EIT. The bandwidth of the stop band expands as the pump wave is intensified. For the situation of launching the probe wave from the high-field side in a tokamak, the accessibility of the probe wave to the region where the EIT effect appears is investigated. The EIT region which is a resonance layer created by the EIT is accessible to the probe wave, indicating the possibility of the application of EIT to control the spatial position of wave power deposition.

We present a demonstration of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in magnetized plasmas by means of experiment and numerical simulation. EIT in magnetized plasmas is a phenomenon by which a plasma-absorbing electron cyclotron wave is rendered transparent by a pump wave, which is a classical analog to conventional quantum EIT although the plasma EIT is not a quantum-mechanics-based phenomenon. This paper describes an attempt to identify plasma oscillations excited by the mode coupling of a pump wave and a probe wave, which is a key mechanism for achieving magnetized plasma EIT, by an experiment and a particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. A preliminary result of the longitudinal electric field measurement indicates an enhancement of the plasma oscillation in the vicinity of the beat frequency between the probe and pump waves. Also the PIC calculation, which simulated the real experiment, shows a plasma oscillation excited by the mode coupling between the probe and pump waves in the magnetized plasma EIT, showing agreement with theory and experiment.

This study presents a simple and powerful technique for multichannel measurements of the density profile in laboratory plasmas by microwave interferometry. This technique uses electromechanical microwave switches to temporally switch the connection between multiple receiver antennas and one phase-detection circuit. Using this method, the phase information detected at different positions is rearranged into a time series that can be acquired from a minimum number of data acquisition channels (e.g., two channels in the case of quadrature detection). Our successfully developed multichannel microwave interferometer that uses the antenna switching method was applied to measure the radial electron density profiles in a magnetized plasma experiment. The advantage of the proposed method is its compactness and scalability to multidimensional measurement systems at low cost.