Study of plasma termination using high-Z noble gas puffing in the JT-60U tokamak

Bakhtiari, M.; Tamai, Hiroshi ; Kawano, Yasunori; Kramer, G. J.*; Isayama, Akihiko; Nakano, Tomohide; Kamiya, Kensaku; Yoshino, Ryuji; Miura, Yukitoshi; Kusama, Yoshinori; Nishida, Yasushi*

In the previous works we had shown that injecting a mixture of large amounts of hydrogen and small amounts of argon can terminate a tokamak discharge quickly with avoiding runaway electron generation. In this work we have done the same experiments but with different gases in addition to argon. In fact we compared the effect of the puffing of argon, krypton, and xenon gases with and without simultaneous hydrogen gas puffing on disruption mitigation. We observed that injecting all impurities in the form of an admixture in hydrogen lead to faster plasma shutdowns with less runaway electron generation. We also found that injecting krypton gas (with or without hydrogen) seems to be a good candidate for plasma shutdown purposes since it induces low heat flux to divertor plates and avoids runaway electron generation more effectively.