Related papers: Understanding nonlinear saturation in zonal-flow-d…
We study a quasi-two-dimensional electrostatic drift kinetic system as a model for near-marginal ion temperature gradient (ITG) driven turbulence. A proof is given of the nonlinear stability of this system under conditions of linear…
The scaling of turbulent heat flux with respect to electrostatic potential is examined in the framework of a reduced ($4$D) kinetic system describing electrostatic turbulence in magnetized plasmas excited by the ion temperature gradient…
We present a simplified approach enforcing energy conservation to incorporate the effects of zonal modes alongside wave-particle nonlinearities in the determination of the saturation amplitude. The model assumes that the zonal perturbations…
The linear instability of the electron temperature gradient (ETG) driven modes in the presence of zonal flows is investigated. Random and deterministic $cos$ - like profiles of the zonal flow are considered. It is shown that the presence of…
Electromagnetic (EM) instabilities and turbulence driven by the electron-temperature gradient are considered in a local slab model of a tokamak-like plasma. The model describes perturbations at scales both larger and smaller than the…
In dilute astrophysical plasmas, thermal conduction is primarily along magnetic field lines, and therefore highly anisotropic. As a result, the usual convective stability criterion is modified from a condition on entropy to a condition on…
We study the effects of anisotropic thermal conduction on low-collisionality, astrophysical plasmas using two and three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations. For weak magnetic fields, dilute plasmas are buoyantly unstable for either…
Turbulent transport remains one of the principal obstacles to achieving efficient magnetic confinement in fusion devices. Two of the dominant drivers of the turbulence are microscale instabilities fuelled by electron- and ion-temperature…
In geophysical and plasma contexts, zonal flows are well known to arise out of turbulence. We elucidate the transition from statistically homogeneous turbulence without zonal flows to statistically inhomogeneous turbulence with steady zonal…
The author presents a model for variability of the flux and polarization of blazars in which turbulent plasma flowing at a relativistic speed down a jet crosses a standing conical shock. The shock compresses the plasma and accelerates…
In this paper a conservation equation is derived for the radially dependent entropy in toroidal geometry using the local approximation of the gyro-kinetic framework. This equation naturally leads to an operative definition for the…
The characteristics of ion temperature gradient (ITG) turbulence in the presence of a magnetic island are numerically investigated using a gyrokinetic model. We observe that in the absence of the usual ITG drive gradient, a solitary…
In a recent one-dimensional numerical fluid simulation study [Saxena et al., Phys. Plasmas 13,032309 (2006)], it was found that an instability is associated with a special class of one-dimensional nonlinear solutions for modulated light…
First-principles numerical simulations are used to describe a transport bifurcation in a differentially rotating tokamak plasma. Such a bifurcation is more probable in a region of zero magnetic shear than one of finite magnetic shear…
Electron and ion energization (i.e., heating and nonthermal acceleration) is a fundamental, but poorly understood, outcome of plasma turbulence. In this work, we present new results on this topic from particle-in-cell simulations of driven…
The consequences of discrete particle noise for a system possessing a possibly unstable collective mode are discussed. It is argued that a zonostrophic instability (of homogeneous turbulence to the formation of zonal flows) occurs just…
We present a numerical and analytical study of the thermal fragmentation of a turbulent flow of interstellar hydrogen. We first present the different dynamical processes and the large range of spatial (and temporal) scales that need to be…
Magnetic geometry has a significant effect on the level of turbulent transport in fusion plasmas. Here, we model and analyze this dependence using multiple machine learning methods and a dataset of > 200,000 nonlinear simulations of…
In this work, the interplay between fast ions and safety factor rational surfaces is studied in a turbulent plasma via global nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations. Initially, the fast particles-induced enhancement of shearing structures from…
Electron plasmas confined by an external magnetic field exhibit variations in a two-dimensional plane orthogonal to the confining magnetic field. A nonlinear fluid simulation code to investigate the properties of 2-D electron plasma wave…