Novel Multi-Energy Soft X-Ray Camera in the WEST Tokamak: First Data and Synthetic Diagnostic*

During the C6 campaign, the tungsten (W) Environment in Steady-state Tokamak (WEST)

tokamak will operate for the 1st time with a water-cooled full tungsten divertor -similar to that of

ITER- and long-pulse scenarios, making it an ideal environment for high-Z impurity transport

studies. In that context, a compact multi-energy ( 2-30 keV) soft x-ray diagnostic (MESXR)

was deployed by PPPL in WEST for high-Z impurity transport studies and electron

temperature profile measurements. The ME-SXR consists of the PILATUS3 photon-counting

detector manufactured by DECTRIS Ltd. mounted on a pinhole camera with a temporal and

spatial resolution of 2 ms and 1-2 cm, respectively. The novelty of this soft x-ray diagnostic lies

in the fact that the lower-energy threshold is set independently on each one of the 100k pixels

with a high energy resolution (< 1 keV). The design, capabilities and engineering challenges of

the ME-SXR diagnostic are briefly presented here.

This contribution mainly presents the first data of the ME-SXR diagnostic acquired during

C6. A tentative comparison of the experimental x-ray emissivity with predictions made using

the synthetic diagnostic based on the FLYCHK suite for the computation of the charge-state

distribution and x-ray emissivity of the plasmas as well as the ToFu open-source python

library will also be presented.