Acceleration of ion rotation is observed during internal reconnection events (IREs) in the versatile experiment spherical torus. Two IRE discharges with opposite torques, i.e. acceleration or deceleration of ohmic plasmas with intrinsic, counter-I p rotation, can be generated using different wall conditionings method. When an IRE occurs, acceleration and deceleration of impurity ion rotation as well as well-known ion heating are observed globally via ion Doppler spectroscopy with multiple channels including a single channel with a high temporal resolution of 0.2 ms. Interestingly, ion heating is observed earlier than the ion rotation acceleration, indicating that this phenomenon has a different mechanism from usual magnetic reconnection. We present several possible mechanisms for the rotation acceleration. For several reasons, the ions are thought to be accelerated by a neoclassical toroidal viscosity (NTV) torque rather than mechanisms such as the reconnection outflow and toroidal electric field induced by the current profile change. A simple 0D momentum balance model with NTV torque in the 1/ν collisionality regime agrees well with the experimental results. Furthermore, a positive correlation between ion temperature and plasma rotation is identified, whereby the NTV torque S NTV and ion temperature T i are related via .

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Abstract:A new technique to improve the integral nonlinearity of the "linear-in-dB" variable gain amplifier (VGA) by adopting a piecewise linear transfer curve rather than a single curve is presented. The conventional single curve which is the first-order approximation of the exponential function yields bigger deviation errors as the gain control code advances. The integral nonlinearity (INL) of the proposed piecewise linear curve can be managed to be smaller because one of divisional curves moves to another before the deviation becomes prominent. A generic circuit schematic without chip size overhead is suggested with its future expansion in mind, and a design in a 0.35 μm CMOS process under 3.3 V supply is proposed and verified.

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