Experimental investigations carried out in the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak under various conditions demonstrate that the ion heat flux at the plasma edge plays a key role in the L–H transition physics, while the electron heat flux does not seem to play any role. This is due to the fact that the ion heat flux governs the radial electric field well induced by the main ions which is responsible for the turbulence stabilization causing the L–H transition. The experiments have been carried out in the low density branch of the power threshold where the electron and ion heat channels can be well separated. In plasmas heated by electron heating, the edge ion heat flux has been increased to reach the L–H transition by using separately three actuators: heating power, density and plasma current. In addition, the key role of the edge ion heating has been confirmed in experiments taking advantage of the direct ion heating provided by neutral beam injection. The role of the ion heat flux explains the non-monotonic density dependence of the L–H threshold power. Based on these results, a formula for the density of the threshold minimum has been developed, which also describes well the values found in tokamaks of various size. For ITER it predicts a value which is close to the density presently foreseen to enter the H-mode and indicates that operation at half field and current would benefit from a very significantly lower density minimum and correspondingly low threshold power.
L-H transition studies on MAST: power threshold and heat flux analysis