A high-power long lifetime beam dump for the Thomson scattering diagnostic system in the XuanLong-50 experiment

Abstract

The Energy iNNovation’s XuanLong-50 is a spherical torus experiment with up to 10 s plasma operation duration. A 3 J/50 Hz pulsed laser is used in the Thomson scattering diagnostic system that is developed to measure the time evolutions of plasma electron temperature and density profiles. The expected laser pulse number is about 7.5 × 106/year with a power load of 150 W. To meet at least 1-year lifetime requirement, a Chevron type beam dump with polished molybdenum plates is designed and fabricated, which absorbs the laser beam energy in a 3D structure to reduce the laser fluence deposited on the material surface. To prevent the backscattered stray light from interfering with the Thomson scattering measurements, a 7.5 m beam path with folding mirrors is set between the beam dump and the plasma scattering volumes. Details of the beam dump design procedure including the laser beam profile control, multi-pulse laser damage threshold, heat dissipation, Zemax modeling, folding mirror selection, and beam path enclosure are presented together with the testing results.