Steady State Turbulent Transport in Magnetic Fusion Plasmas
Authors: W.W. Lee, S. Ethier, R. Kolesnikov, W.X. Wang, and W.M. Tang
Abstract:
For more than a decade, the study of microturbulence, driven by ion temperature gradient (ITG) drift instabilities in tokamak devices, has been an active area of research in magnetic fusion science for both experimentalists and theorists alike. One of the important impetus for this avenue of research was the discovery of the radial streamers associated the ITG modes in the early nineties using a Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code. Since then, ITG simulations based on the codes with increasing realism have become possible with the dramatic increase in computing power. The notable examples were the demonstration of the importance of nonlinearly generated zonal flows in regulating ion thermal transport and the transition from Bohm to GyroBoham scaling with increased device size. In this paper, we will describe another interesting nonlinear physical process associated with the parallel acceleration of the ions, that is found to play an important role for the steady state turbulent transport. Its discovery is again through the use of the modern massively parallel supercomputers.
__________________________________________________
Accepted for publication in: Computational Science and Discovery (2008) Published under Title: Nonlinear Turbulent Transport in Magnetic Fusion Plasmas
__________________________________________________
Download
PPPL-4275 Preprint (December 2007) (pdf 1.2 MB)