EN
The Cotton-Mouton effect in sheared plasma with helical magnetic lines is studied on the basis of the equation for complex amplitude ratio (CAR). A simple model for helical magnetic lines in sheared plasma of toroidal configuration is suggested. The equation for CAR in the sheared plasma is solved by perturbation method, using the small shear angle deviations as is characteristic for tokamak plasma. It is shown that the inaccuracy in polarization measurements caused by deviations of the sheared angle amounts to some percentage of the shearless Cotton-Mouton phase shift. One suggested method is to subtract the “sheared” term, which may improve the accuracy of the Cotton-Mouton measurements in the sheared plasma.