Characterization of correlations of fast-ion H-alpha measurement volumes in Wendelstein 7-X by particle tracking

This paper characterizes the correlation of simultaneous measurements with different fast-ion H-alpha (FIDA) spectroscopy sightlines on Wendelstein 7-X. Using a collisionless guiding-center code, it is shown that, for two investigated volumes in the bulk of the plasma, some regions of phase space are correlated and the magnetic configuration has little influence on this correlation. For the sightlines of the FIDA system, the correlation between these is explained well by the magnetic configuration. Sightlines with measurement volumes at the same spatial locations have the highest correlation, and sightlines with measurement volumes near the same flux surface but on different sides of the magnetic axis have a high correlation. The correlation between the blueshifted signal in the starting sightline and redshifted signal in the detection sightline is investigated, demonstrating that it is possible to investigate any finite interval of detection wavelengths. Due to the different shapes of the weight functions for the toroidal and oblique sightlines, the blue-redshift correlation is very different from the total-spectrum correlation. The correlation between the toroidal and oblique sightline fans is relatively much larger than the internal correlation in the oblique sightlines, which is however, much larger than the internal correlation in the toroidal sightlines. This is a result of the dependence of the weight functions on the angle between the sightline and magnetic field, illustrating how important it is for the FIDA sightlines to cover different angles with the magnetic field. (c) 2022 Author(s)