The use of microwave reflectometry in the estimation of the bicoherency of the turbulent modes in plasmas is theoretically investigated. The full-wave two-dimensional model of microwave scattering in plasma is applied to simulate the reflectometer response to the turbulent fluctuations, consisting of random and coherent modes, and the simulated data ensemble is further processed to obtain the auto-bicoherence function. The sensitivity of the method was analysed for different ambient plasma profiles, geometry, fluctuation spectra and amplitudes.It was found that for plasma conditions similar to the edge JT-60U tokamak plasma, reflectometry-based estimations of the bicoherency can prove the existence of the phase-coupled modes only if the ratio of coherent to random amplitudes is larger than unity. Reflectometry in plasmas with stronger curvature of the cut-off layer has a better sensitivity to coherent fluctuations as compared to weak-curvature profiles.As an illustration, the results obtained were applied to the data ensemble acquired by the O-mode reflectometer on the JT-60U tokamak to demonstrate the existence of strong phase coupling in the H-mode plasma near the separatrix.
Microwave imaging reflectometry for the measurement of turbulent fluctuations in tokamaks