A Survey of Plasma Instrumentation

Most of the properties of plasmas are difficult to determine. This is especially true for high temperature, dense, transient plasmas such as encountered in controlled fusion research. If high temperatures and long plasma confinement times are to be achieved the measuring instruments must not perturb the plasma. Since each transient event has its own personality and cannot be expected to be exactly like any preceding or subsequent event, all information (ideally) must be collected each time, without relying on reproducibility. Such plasma instrumentation has been given the name "plasma diagnostics". A survey and evaluation of several diagnostic techniques is given. Applications of some of the more important ones to specific experiments are shown and a comparison of measured quantities is made. A tabulation of several commonly used techniques is given in Tables I, II and III, together with a crude evaluation of them. Most of the methods are applicable to general plasma work but some are used only in controlled fusion experimentation.