Investigation of the poloidal spectral resolution of O-mode reflectometry with two-dimensional full-wave modeling

Both the plasma poloidal curvature and the curvature of the probing wave-front play an important role for the spectral resolution of microwave reflectometry. The propagation of electromagnetic waves in a cylindrical plasma with a refractive index monotonically decreasing towards its center leads to elongation of the wave-front (i.e. an increase of the radius of curvature near the axis of radiation). Such a phase-front alteration can result in a major modification of the reflectometry response regarding on high k θ fluctuations. At the same time, the curvature of the cutoff surface in cylindrical plasma is always less than the curvature of the cutoff density for an O-mode wave. For specific geometry of the TEXTOR tokamak we perform numerical two-dimensional full-wave reflectometry synthesizing. The response from poloidaly rotating coherent density perturbation was analyzed on the variety of the plasma cutoff curvature and density scale length, which affects the incident wave-front curvature. The simulations are shown that the increase of the incident wave front curvature extends the spectral resolution of conventional reflectometer with gain antennas. On the other hand, the effect from the cutoff curvature is found to be much weaker as compare to the wave-front effect.