Hydrogen retention in tungsten materials studied by Laser Induced Desorption

Development of methods to characterise the first wall in ITER and future fusion devices without removal of wall tiles is important to support safety assessments for tritium retention and dust production and to understand plasma wall processes in general. Laser based techniques are presently under investigation to provide these requirements, among which Laser Induced Desorption Spectroscopy (LIDS) is proposed to measure the deuterium and tritium load of the plasma facing surfaces by thermal desorption and spectroscopic detection of the desorbed fuel in the edge of the fusion plasma. The method relies on its capability to desorb the hydrogen isotopes in a laser heated spot. The application of LID on bulk tungsten targets exposed to a wide range of deuterium fluxes, fluences and impact energies under different surface temperatures is investigated in this paper. The results are compared with Thermal Desorption Spectrometry (TDS), Nuclear Reaction Analysis (NRA) and a diffusion model.