No abstract

Soils in tropical croplands are becoming degraded because of soil carbon (C) depletion. Local farmers in South India use a specific management of traditional cultivation, i.e., broadcast seeding. However, for sustainable C management, there is no quantitative data on the CO2 flux under this management. Our objectives were to (1) estimate the annual CO2 flux, and (2) evaluate the effect of traditional cultivation management (seeding rate) on the CO2 flux. Our field experiment was conducted in South India, from 2015 to 2017, including two cultivation periods with four cultivation management treatments (traditional cultivation management plot (T), fixed density plot (FD), no thinning plot (NT), and bare plot (B)). The seeding rate in the FD plot was ca. 50% of the T plot. We applied 1.1 Mg C ha−1 farmyard manure just before the experiment as a C input. We found that broadcasting, thinning, and cultivation increased soil moisture, while the CO2 efflux rate showed no significant difference between treatments throughout the experimental period. This indicates that cultivation management did not affect the CO2 flux. The total CO2 fluxes for two years were estimated at 2.2–2.7 Mg C ha−1. Our results indicate that it is necessary to apply larger or more frequent C inputs to prevent C depletion.

A large volume negative ion source, which has a newly devised magnetic filter called a PG filter, was designed and tested. The PG filter produces a uniform magnetic filter field over a large extraction area of 14×36 cm2 by flowing a high current through the plasma grid itself. By optimizing the filter strength, we succeeded to produce 3.4-A 75-keV negative hydrogen ion beams for 50 ms from 253 apertures of 11.3 mm diam with an average current H− density of 13 mA/cm2.

Elucidation and control of the low temperature recombining plasmas under fusion relevant conditions are crucial issues. In this study, we applied a conditional average for laser Thomson scattering technique to measure the temporal evolution of the plasma instability in detached recombining plasmas in the divertor simulator NAGDIS-II. In recombining plasmas, it is shown that the electron energy distribution function has a non-Maxwellian component, and the fraction of the low electron temperature component increases with the gas pressure. It is found that one of the major reasons to cause the non-Maxwellian distribution function is in the temporal variations of the electron temperature. By using the conditional averaging method, the temporal evolutions of the spatial (vertical and radial) profiles of the electron density and temperature are revealed for different frequency ranges.

Multipoint measurements were carried out by employing a microwave interferometer (MI) and a Langmuir probe (LP) in steady-state detached plasmas in the linear plasma device NAGDIS-II to reveal the structure of fluctuations along the magnetic field. We changed the LP position along the magnetic field while the MI was fixed at an upstream position. In addition, a fast framing camera was used to identify an azimuthal mode number, and the predominant mode number was identified as m = 1. By analyzing correlations between signals observed by the LP and the MI, it was found that a time delay of 10–20 kHz fluctuations gradually decreased toward the downstream direction. The results indicate a decrease in the rotation velocity in the E × B direction, and suggest that the 10–20 kHz fluctuation forms a spiral shape.