Transport studies in the snowflake divertor in TCV

The transport of heat and particles in a tokamak plasma with a snowflake divertor has been studied in recent TCV experiments. Estimates of the power flux onto the divertor plates are obtained from measurements with multiple infrared cameras and Langmuir probes. The studies include L- and ELMy H-mode plasmas and confirm some of the advantageous properties of the snowflake configuration, such as the distribution of the exhaust power on more strike points than the two that characterize conventional divertor configurations. Modifications of the divertor configuration from single null towards a perfect snowflake (second-order null) show that already near-snowflake configurations lead to an appreciable power flux across the region of weak poloidal magnetic field.