Alcator C-Mod Weekly Highlights
               November 10, 2008

FY2009 weeks of research operations:
  Target: TBD
  Completed:  0 weeks


Physics
-------

C-Mod scientists and students are preparing and reviewing talks and
posters for the upcoming 50th APS-DPP meeting. Planned presentations
from the C-Mod team at the conference include 1 invited tutorial talk, 6
invited orals, 15 contributed orals, and 31 contributed posters.

Bruce Lipschultz has been investigating the condition of molybdenum tile
surfaces at large major radius. He has shown that some surfaces, remote
from the plasma periphery, are rough. That roughness appears to be due
to melting of very thin (50-100 micron) layers of the Mo tiles. The
implications of the surface roughness for operation are being
considered.


Operations
----------

Preparations are complete for the silver plating of the TF core fingers.
We expect the vendor to being this work this week.  Some of the
horizontal arm fingers will also be plated.  Sixteen out of twenty
vertical legs now have new feltmetal installed.  The feltmetal work on
all forty horizontal arms has been completed.  We continue to install
and cure inner cylinder heaters.


Lower Hybrid System
-------------------

High power tests of the copper plated 4-way splitter continued.  Small
modifications to the spacing between the transformer and splitter are
being made to document the variation in reflected power.  This spacing
is a critical dimension determining the performance of the lower hybrid
coupler.  Development of the rf probe design, and the circuitry needed
to measure reflected power and phase, continued last week.


ICRF Systems
------------

We continued work on the FMIT#4 Intermediate Power Amplifier (IPA)
control and protection system.  It is now to the stage at which tuning
of the system can begin.  Work has begun on the FMIT#3 IPA system.


Travel and Visits
-----------------

Martin Greenwald, Amanda Hubbard, Ian Hutchinson, Miklos Porkolab, and
Dennis Whyte traveled to Washington last week to attend a meeting of the
Fusion Energy Science Advisory Committee (FESAC).  Martin Greenwald was
appointed this week as the new FESAC chairman.  Dennis Whyte presented a
talk: " The Challenges of Plasma-Surface Interactions in ITER and
Beyond"

Steve Wukitch, Yijun Lin, and Cornwall Lau met last week with Greg
Hanson, ORNL, to discuss the scrape-off-layer reflectometer systems
planned for the new LH coupler and the new 4-strap ICRF antenna.



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