Development of a toroidal soft x-ray imaging system and application for investigating three-dimensional plasma on J-TEXT

A toroidal soft x-ray imaging (T-SXRI) system has been developed to investigate three-dimensional (3D) plasma physics on J-TEXT. This T-SXRI system consists of three sets of SXR arrays. Two sets are newly developed and located on the vacuum chamber wall at toroidal positions \phi of 126.4° and 272.6°, respectively, while one set was established previously at \phi = 65.5 °. Each set of SXR arrays consists of three arrays viewing the plasma poloidally, and hence can be used separately to obtain SXR images via the tomographic method. The sawtooth precursor oscillations are measured by T-SXRI, and the corresponding images of perturbative SXR signals are successfully reconstructed at these three toroidal positions, hence providing measurement of the 3D structure of precursor oscillations. The observed 3D structure is consistent with the helical structure of the m/n = 1/1 mode. The experimental observation confirms that the T-SXRI system is able to observe 3D structures in the J-TEXT plasma.