Soft x-ray measurements from the PDX tokamak

Temporally and spatially resolved profiles of the PDX soft x‐ray spectra have been measured during single tokamak pulses of circular divertor plasmas with a recently developed pulse‐height analyzer. This detection system incorporates an array of five vertically displaced sets of lithium‐drifted silicon detectors, each consisting of three independent channels optimized for rapid data collection in adjacent energy regions. Simultaneous measurements of x‐ray emission integrated along five chords of the plasma cross section can, thereby, be achieved. Abel inversion of these data yields temporally resolved radial profiles of the local electron temperature from the slope of the continuum, concentrations of high‐Z impurities from the characteristic line intensities, and a measure of Zeff from the continuum intensity. The techniques of x‐ray pulse‐height analysis, with illustrations featuring the results from the initial PDX circular plasma experiments, are discussed in detail. In addition, comparisons between ci...