The authors are particularly grateful to Pr. A. Bers (MIT/USA) for having motivated the present work, by pointing out the interest in calculating selfconsistently the RF current drive with the bootstrap current in high-βp plasmas, for arbitrary type of waves. His constant support during this works is warmely acknowledged. The authors are also grateful to Pr. A. Ram (MIT/USA) for interesting suggestions concerning this work, Dr. R. W. Harvey (CompX, USA) for his interest concerning the design of the fully implicit 3 -D bounce-averaged Fokker-Planck solver as a part of the kinetic calculation tool, and especially fast electron transport physics.
They would like also to acknowledge Dr. L. -G. Eriksson (CEA/France) for enlightening discussions on fundamental aspects of the kinetic physics in tokamaks, Dr. G. Huysmans (CEA/France) for providing his kind help concerning informations on magnetic equilibrium code reconstruction HELENA, Dr. V. Basiuk for a continuous support concerning some interface aspects in the development of the kinetic code, and Dr. R. Dumont for fruitful discussions.
One of the author (Y.P.) would like to express his thanks for Dr. M. Shoucri (Hydro-Québec, Canada) and Dr. I. P. Shkarofsky (Canada) who both started in the pionneering work on fast relativistic Fokker-Planck calculations, ten years ago. The present results are based on a similar approach which extends this type of calculation tool for realistic applications in reactor relevant fusion devices like ITER.