The flow structure of ions in a diverging magnetic field has been experimentally studied in an electron cyclotron resonance plasma. The flow velocity field of ions has been measured with directional Langmuir probes calibrated with the laser induced fluorescence spectroscopy. For low ion-temperature plasmas, it is concluded that the ion acceleration due to the axial electric field is important compared with that of gas dynamic effect. It has also been found that the detachment of ion stream line from the magnetic field line takes place when the parameter ͉f ci L B / V i ͉ becomes order unity, where f ci , L B , and V i are the ion cyclotron frequency, the characteristic scale length of magnetic field inhomogeneity, and the ion flow velocity, respectively. In the detachment region, a radial electric field is generated in the plasma and the ions move straight with the E ϫ B rotation driven by the radial electric field.

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A high resolution laser induced fluorescence (LIF) system has been developed to measure the flow velocity field of neutral particles in an electron-cyclotron-resonance argon plasma. The flow velocity has been determined by the Doppler shift of the LIF spectrum, which is proportional to the velocity distribution function. Very high accuracy in velocity determination has been achieved by installing a saturated absorption spectroscopy unit into the LIF system, where the absolute value and scale of laser wavelength are determined by using the Lamb dip and the fringes of a Fabry-Perot interferometer. The minimum detectable flow velocity of a newly developed LIF system is +/-2 m/s, and this performance remains unchanged in a long-time experiment. From the radial measurements of LIF spectra of argon metastable atoms, it is found that there exists an inward flow of neutral particles associated with neutral depletion.

Parallel ion flow velocity along a magnetic field has been measured using a laser induced fluorescence (LIF) method in an electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) argon plasma with a weakly-diverging magnetic field. To measure parallel flow velocity in a cylindrical plasma using the LIF method, the laser beam should be injected along device axis; however, the reflection of the incident beam causes interference between the LIF emission of the incident and reflected beams. Here we present a method of quasi-parallel laser injection at a small angle, which utilizes the reflected beam as well as the incident beam to obtain the parallel ion flow velocity. Using this method, we observed an increase in parallel ion flow velocity along the magnetic field. The acceleration mechanism is briefly discussed on the basis of the ion fluid model.

We have developed a Lamb-dip laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) system to precisely measure the local magnetic field strength in a plasma. Utilizing the hole burning effect, we made sharp dips on the LIF spectrum as the frequency markers and accurately determined the Zeeman splitting by reading the frequency interval of the dips. The method is valid even in the conditions where the Doppler broadening of the LIF spectrum is larger than the Zeeman shift. The newly developed LIF system is capable of determining a magnetic field strength on the order of 10 À4 T. It has been demonstrated that the Lamb-dip LIF system can successfully reproduce a very small field inhomogeneity in the HYPER-I linear device.