Gyrokinetic Simulation of Isotope Scaling in Tokamak Plasmas
Authors: W.W. Lee and R.A. Santoro
A three-dimensional (3D) global gyrokinetic particle code in toroidal geometry has been used for investigating the transport properties of ion temperature gradient (ITG) drift in- stabilities in tokamak plasmas. Using the isotopes of hydrogen (H + ), deuterium (D + ) and tritium (T + ), it is found that, under otherwise identical conditions, there exists a trend for favorable isotope scaling for the ion thermal diffusivity, i.e., ci decreases with mass. Such a trend, which exists both at the saturation of the instability and also at the fully nonlinear stage, can be understood from the resulting wavenumber and frequency spectra.