RESUMEN
One of the main diagnostic tools for measuring electron density profiles and the characteristics of long wavelength turbulent wave structures in fusion plasmas is beam emission spectroscopy (BES). The increasing number of BES systems necessitated an accurate and comprehensive simulation of BES diagnostics, which in turn motivated the development of the Rate Equations for Neutral Alkali-beam TEchnique (RENATE) simulation code that is the topic of this paper. RENATE is a modular, fully three-dimensional code incorporating all key features of BES systems from the atomic physics to the observation, including an advanced modeling of the optics. Thus RENATE can be used both in the interpretation of measured signals and the development of new BES systems. The most important components of the code have been successfully benchmarked against other simulation codes. The primary results have been validated against experimental data from the KSTAR tokamak.
RESUMEN
A deconvolution-based correction method of the beam emission spectroscopy (BES) density profile measurement is demonstrated by its application to simulated measurements of the COMPASS and TEXTOR tokamaks. If the line of sight is far from tangential to the flux surfaces, and the beam width is comparable to the scale length on which the light profile varies, the observation may cause an undesired smoothing of the light profile, resulting in a non-negligible underestimation of the calculated density profile. This effect can be reduced significantly by the emission reconstruction method, which gives an estimate of the emissivity along the beam axis from the measured light profile, taking the finite beam width and the properties of the measurement into account in terms of the transfer function of the observation. Characteristics and magnitude of the mentioned systematic error and its reduction by the introduced method are studied by means of the comprehensive alkali BES simulation code RENATE.