Nonequilibrium radiative properties in fluctuating plasmas1

A general kinetic model was developed to simulate the radiative properties of nonstationary fluctuating plasmas and characterize the relationship between the nonstationary fluctuation time and the atomic relaxation times. The developed theory is applied to the radiative line emission in the case of instabilities in tokamaks. It is shown by exact time dependent simulations that involve explicitly LSJ-split excited states that the radiation emission in fluctuating plasma can be larger than in the corresponding stationary limits. For regular fluctuations like the sawtooth activity, also the startup phase of sawtooth activity can lead to higher emission compared to the time dependent regular phase. It is demonstrated that the sawtooth crash can be almost exactly followed by resonance line emission like H-like Lyman-alpha and He-like Helium-alpha of, e.g., argon impurity ions, whereas the effective charge state distribution lags seriously behind.