Related papers: Nonlinear stabilization of tokamak microturbulence…
High-power-density tokamaks offer a potential solution to design cost-effective fusion devices. One way to achieve high power density is to operate at a high $\beta$ value (the ratio of thermal to magnetic pressure), i.e., $\beta \sim 1$.…
Currents driven by rf (radio frequency) waves in the interior of magnetic islands can stabilize deleterious tearing modes in tokamaks. Present analyses of stabilization assume that the local electron acceleration is unaffected by the…
Recent work demonstrated that breaking the up-down symmetry of tokamak flux surfaces removes a constraint that limits intrinsic momentum transport, and hence toroidal rotation, to be small. We show, through MHD analysis, that ellipticity is…
A gyrokinetic simulation of the influence of electron cyclotron current drive and ion kinetic effect on the m/n=2/1 tearing mode (TM) instabilities is presented in HL-2A and DIII-D tokamak configurations. The TM evolution is calculated with…
Efficient control of turbulent heat transport is crucial for magnetic confinement fusion reactors. This work discusses the complex interplay between density gradients and micro-instabilities, shedding light on their impact on turbulent heat…
A subgrid electron-temperature-gradient (ETG) model is demonstrated here which averages local electron-scale turbulence from the GENE code over intermediate scales in space and time to include in global ion-temperature-gradient (ITG) GEM…
The first gyrokinetic simulations of plasma turbulence in the Texas Helimak device, a simple magnetized torus, are presented. The device has features similar to the scrape-off layer region of tokamaks, such as bad-curvature-driven…
Understanding the interaction mechanisms between large-scale magnetohydrodynamic instabilities and small-scale drift-wave microturbulence is essential for predicting and optimizing the performance of magnetic confinement based fusion energy…
The role of self-generated zonal flows in the collisionless trapped-electron mode (CTEM) turbulence is a long-standing open issue in tokamak plasmas. Here we show, for the first time, that the zonal flow excitation in the CTEM turbulence is…
Recently, theoretical analysis has identified plasma microinstabilities as the primary mechanism responsible for anomalous heat transport in tokamaks. In particular, the microtearing mode (MTM) has been credited with the production of…
We propose a quantitative model of ion temperature gradient driven turbulence in toroidal magnetized plasmas. In this model, the turbulence is regulated by zonal flows, i.e. mode saturation occurs by a zonal-flow-mediated energy cascade…
It is shown that rapid substantial changes in heating rate can induce transitions to improved energy confinement regimes in zero-dimensional models for tokamak plasma phenomenology. We examine for the first time the effect of step changes…
Gyrokinetic simulations have greatly improved our theoretical understanding of turbulent transport in fusion devices. Most gyrokinetic models in use are delta-f simulations in which the slowly varying radial profiles of density and…
Microtearing modes are an important drive of turbulent heat transport in present-day fusion plasmas. We investigate their linear stability under very-low collisionality regimes, expected for the next generations of devices, using…
In previous work we provided the explicit form of the nonlinear PDEs, subjected to the appropriate boundary conditions, which have to be satisfied by transport coefficients for systems out of Onsager's region. Since the proposed PDEs are…
In the complex 3D magnetic fields of stellarators, ion-temperature-gradient turbulence is shown to have two distinct saturation regimes, as revealed by petascale numerical simulations, and explained by a simple turbulence theory. The first…
This study investigates the effect of the ion-to-electron temperature ratio ($T_i/T_e$) on microturbulence driven transport in Quiescent H-mode (QH-mode) plasmas in the DIII-D tokamak. Utilizing the Gyrokinetic Toroidal Code (GTC) and the…
Balanced double-null configurations are of general interest for boundary plasma physics, and they have been proposed for some future designs. Experimental observations demonstrate absence of plasma fluctuations in tokamak high-field side…
In this work we numerically demonstrate both significant transient (i.e. non-modal) linear amplification and sustained nonlinear turbulence in a kinetic plasma system with no unstable eigenmodes. The particular system considered is an…
Three dimensional computations of self consistent three species gyrofluid turbulence are carried out for tokamak edge conditions. Profiles as well as disturbances in dependent variables are followed, running the dynamical system to…