Relative Abundance of Charged States

To determine the relative abundance of ionization stages, there are no alternatives to spectroscopic measurements. In fusion devices, the distribution of the ionization stages deviates from coronal equilibrium, due to transport and finite confinement of the ions as well as charge exchange recombination with neutral hydrogen. Both the particle transport and the diffusion reduce the 

In contrast to the density measurements of Li-like ions by means of inner-shell excitation, the spectra provide information not directly on the density 

Within the last 25 years of X-ray spectroscopy on fusion devices, the theory of He-like ions has been developed to an impressive precision. The spectra can be modeled with deviations not more than 10% on all lines. For the modeling, only parameters with physical meaning and no additional approximation factors are required. Even the small effects due to recombination of H-like atoms, which contribute only a few percent to the line intensity, can be used to explain consistently the recombination processes and hence the charge state distribution in a hot plasma. The measurements on fusion devices such as tokamaks or stellarators allow the comparison to the standard diagnostics for the same parameters. As these diagnostics are based on different physical processes, they provide sensitive tests for the atomic physics used for the synthetic spectra. They also allow distinguishing between different theoretical approaches to predict the spectra of other elements within the iso-electronic series. The modeling of the X-ray spectra of astronomical objects or solar flares, which are now frequently explored by X-ray satellite missions, is now more reliable. In these experiments, the statistical quality of the spectra is limited due to the finite observation time or the lifetime of 

The authors are glad to thank many scientists, who have contributed to the results. The TEXTOR team, where the measurements were performed and highly reproducible plasmas were provided, especially to Dr. W. Biel, who did the experiments on the transport properties of TEXTOR, Prof. L. Vainshtein, Dr. A. Urnov and F. Goryaev provided us with the results of atomic data calculation. Dr. N. Badnell trained one of us (O. M.) to get the results on dielectronic recombination using atomic codes. Dr. S. Fritzsche put our attention to the cascades within the Li-like ions and Prof. R. Janev discussed the charge exchange recombination processes. Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory supported the measurements on TEXTOR, both by cooperation with Dr. M. Bitter, and loan of X-ray detectors. 

Bertschinger G. et al., Proc. 27th EPS Conference on Controlled Fusion and Plasma Phys., Budapest, 24B, 840-843 (2000) 

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