Quantifying noise sources in the KSTAR 2014 Thomson Scattering system from the measured variation on electron temperature

With the Thomson scattering (TS) system in KSTAR, temporal evolution of electron temperature (T_e) is estimated using a weighted look-up table method with fast sampling (1.25 or 2.5 GS/s) digitizers during the 2014 KSTAR campaign. Background noise level is used as a weighting parameter without considering the photon noise due to the absence of information on absolute photon counts detected by the TS system. Estimated electron temperature during a relatively quiescent discharge are scattered, i.e., 15% variation on T_e with respect to its mean value. We find that this 15% variation on T_e cannot be explained solely by the background noise level which leads us to include photon noise effects in our analysis. Using synthetic data, we have estimated the required photon noise level consistent with the observation and determined the dominant noise source in KSTAR TS system.