Chasing the multi-modal plasma response in MAST-U

Abstract Achieving ELM suppression in spherical tokamaks by applying resonant magnetic perturbations (RMP) has proven challenging. The poloidal spectrum of the applied RMP is a key parameter that has an impact on the capability to mitigate and eventually suppress ELMs. In this work the resistive magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) code MARS-F (Liu et al 2000 Phys. Plasmas 7 3681 ) is used to evaluate the possibility of directly measuring the plasma response in MAST-U, and particularly its variation as function of the applied poloidal spectrum, in order to guide the experimental validation of the predicted best RMP configuration for ELM suppression. Toroidal mode number n=2 RMP is considered to minimize the presence of sidebands, and to avoid the deleterious core coupling of n=1. Singular Value Decomposition is used to highlight linearly independent structures in the simulated magnetic 3D fields and how those structures can be measured at the wall where the magnetic sensors are located. Alternative ways to measure the multimodal plasma response and how they can be used to infer the best RMP configuration to achieve ELM suppression are also presented, including the plasma displacement and the 3D footprints at the divertor plates.