Related papers: Stabilisation of short-wavelength instabilities by…
Starting from the assumption that saturation of plasma turbulence driven by temperature-gradient instabilities in fusion plasmas is achieved by a local energy cascade between a long-wavelength outer scale, where energy is injected into the…
Plasma turbulence is the dominant transport mechanism for heat and particles in magnetized plasmas in linear devices and tokamaks, so the study of turbulence is important in limiting and controlling this transport. Linear devices provide an…
The prevailing paradigm for plasma turbulence associates a unique stationary state to given equilibrium parameters. We report the discovery of bistable turbulence in a strongly magnetised plasma. Two distinct states, obtained with identical…
Multiple space and time scales arise in plasma turbulence in magnetic confinement fusion devices because of the smallness of the square root of the electron-to-ion mass ratio $(m_e/m_i)^{1/2}$ and the consequent disparity of the ion and…
Relaxations of localized over-density in a plane transverse to the magnetic field are numericallyinvestigated under the effect of drift-wave and interchange drives in SOL conditions. Such a controlleddeparture from thermodynamic equilibrium…
Scaling laws for ion temperature gradient driven turbulence in magnetized toroidal plasmas are derived and compared with direct numerical simulations. Predicted dependences of turbulence fluctuation amplitudes, spatial scales, and resulting…
The competition between the drive and stabilization of plasma microinstabilities by sheared flow is investigated, focusing on the ion temperature gradient mode. Using a twisting mode representation in sheared slab geometry, the…
We have extended our study of the competition between the drive and stabilization of plasma microinstabilities by sheared flow to include electromagnetic effects at low plasma $\beta$ (the ratio of plasma to magnetic pressure). The extended…
Weakly collisional space plasmas are rarely in local thermal equilibrium and often exhibit non-Maxwellian electron and ion velocity distributions that lead to the growth of microinstabilities, that is, enhanced electric and magnetic fields…
We investigate the effect of varying the ion temperature gradient (ITG) and toroidal equilibrium scale sheared flow on ion-scale turbulence in the outer core of MAST by means of local gyrokinetic simulations. We show that nonlinear…
In many plasma systems, introducing a small background shear flow is enough to stabilize the system linearly. The nonlinear dynamics are much less sensitive to sheared flows than the average linear growthrates, and very small amplitude…
Strongly driven ion-scale turbulence in tokamak plasmas is shown to be regulated by a new propagating zonal flow mode, the toroidal secondary mode, which is nonlinearly supported by the turbulence. The mode grows and propagates due to the…
The cross-magnetic-field (i.e., perpendicular) profile of ion temperature and the perpendicular profile of the magnetic-field-aligned (parallel) plasma flow are sometimes inhomogeneous for space and laboratory plasma. Instability caused by…
The equations of electrostatic drift kinetics are observed to possess a symmetry associated with their intrinsic scale invariance. Under the assumptions of spatial periodicity, stationarity, and locality, this symmetry implies a particular…
Differential rotation is known to suppress linear instabilities in fusion plasmas. However, even in the absence of growing eigenmodes, subcritical fluctuations that grow transiently can lead to sustained turbulence. Here transient growth of…
Traditionally the effects of MHD instabilities and micro-instabilities on plasma confinement are investigated separately. However, these two instabilities often occur simultaneously, with the overlap of the dynamics on a broad range of…
The role of short-wave instabilities on geostrophic turbulence is studied in a simplified model consisting of three layers in the quasi-geostrophic approximation. The linear stability analysis shows that short-wave instabilities are created…
Large-amplitude current-driven plasma instabilities, which can transition to the Buneman instability, were observed in one-dimensional (1D) simulations to generate high-energy backstreaming ions. We investigate the saturation of…
We study the linear stability of weakly magnetized differentially rotating plasmas in both collisionless kinetic theory and Braginskii's theory of collisional, magnetized plasmas. We focus on the very weakly magnetized limit that is…
The dispersion equation, describing the instability development of vortex turbulence excitation in cylindrical plasma in crossed radial electric and axial magnetic fields with taking into account the longitudinal inhomogeneity and finite…