Alcator C-Mod Weekly Highlights
			Nov 15, 1999

Plasma operations continued on Alcator C-Mod last week. This was the final
week of operation during the 1999 Experimental Campaign. Field and current
were returned to their normal direction. Four run-days were scheduled and
completed. A total of 66 plasma shots were produced, with a startup
reliability of over 90%. The facility is now being warmed up to room
temperature in preparation for the upcoming vent.

All of the runs last week were devoted to obtaining performance data on the
J-port four-strap ICRF antenna. Systematic scans of target plasma parameters,
including field, density, current, outer gap, and vertical position were
performed. J-port operation at 0-pi-0-pi phasing was compared with 0-pi-pi-0,
and with the D-port dipole antenna. The J-port antenna appears to have a limit
on power density above which significant impurity injection events occur. This
limit, which was evaluated at ~700kW per strap pair (~1.4MW total) early in
the week, was found to depend only weakly on target conditions.

Most of the physics activity during the past week was concentrated on
preparation of presentations for the APS Division of Plasma Physics Meeting
this week. A total of four invited talks and forty-five contributed
presentations are being given by C-Mod staff and collaborators.

We continued work on the DNB last week.  Now that machine operation has ended
we expect to have more access to the power room where the DNB hardware is
located.  Installation of the HV cable tray in the cell was started.  PLC
program testing for mod/reg and HV supply continued.  Some problems with the
PLC system have been found and will be debugged and fixed early this week.
Internal wiring for ground and return buses continued.  MCL modification
work has begun.  Work continued this week on the DNB platform in the
cell, and work began on bringing up the mod/reg control circuits.  The mod/reg
cabinet and cage was powered up remotely by PLC for the first time, and filament
voltage and grid voltage were turned on (tube not installed). Problems were
encountered in testing anode current monitors.  Bad solder connections on the
Hall sensor boards were found and fixed.  The final calibration of the analog
signal fiber optics was started.



Travel and Visitors
--------------------

Thomas Sunn Pedersen went to Columbia University to give their Friday seminar;
his talk was entitled 'Measurements of H-mode impurity transport in the
Alcator C-Mod edge'

Gary Taylor (PPPL) was back at MIT continuing his discussions with Paul Bonoli
and Eric Nelson-Melby on modeling of ICRF electron heating experiments. At
PPPL, Cynthia Phillips supported these discussions with modeling calculations
using the METS code.  Norton Bretz continued to prepare the installation of
the MSE external optics and data aquisition sytem for C-Mod, which he expects
to bring up in early December when machine access becomes available.  Raffi
Nazikian is continuing to set up reflectometry hardware for checkout prior to
installation at C-Mod during the coming opening.  Stewart Zweben is preparing
the preliminary design review for the new edge turbulence imaging diagnostic.