English

Nonlinear equilibria and transport processes in burning plasmas

Plasma Physics 2023-11-28 v3

Abstract

In this work, we put forward a general phase-space transport theory in axisymmetric tokamak plasmas based upon the concept of zonal state (ZS). Within this theoretical framework, the ZS corresponds to a renormalized plasma nonlinear equilibrium consisting of phase-space zonal structures (PSZS) and zonal electromagnetic fields (ZFs) which evolve self-consistently with symmetry breaking fluctuations and sources/collisions. More specifically, our approach involves deriving governing equations for the evolution of particle distribution functions (i.e, PSZS), which can be used to compute the corresponding macro-/meso-scale evolving magnetized plasma equilibrium adopting the Chew Goldberger Low (CGL) description, separating the spatiotemporal microscale structures. The nonlinear physics of ZFs and of geodesic acoustic modes/energetic particle driven geodesic acoustic modes is then analyzed to illustrate the implications of our theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2306.08642,
  title  = {Nonlinear equilibria and transport processes in burning plasmas},
  author = {Matteo Valerio Falessi and Liu Chen and Zhiyong Qiu and Fulvio Zonca},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.08642},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:05:15.964Z