Design Of A Real-Time Two-Color Interferometer For Mast Upgrade

A single chord two-color CO2/HeNe (10.6/0.633 mu m) heterodyne laser interferometer has been designed to measure the line integral electron density along the mid-plane of the MAST Upgrade tokamak, with a typical error of 1 x 10(18) m(-3) (similar to 2 degrees phase error) at 4 MHz temporal resolution. To ensure this diagnostic system can be restored from any failures without stopping MAST Upgrade operations, it has been located outside of the machine area. The final design and initial testing of this system, including details of the optics, vibration isolation, and a novel phase detection scheme are discussed in this paper.