Related papers: On the interplay between plasma triangularity and …
The tearing mode instability and the associated magnetic islands can lead to a degradation of tokamak plasma performance and eventually to a disruption. A crucial issue for the extension of advanced tokamak scenarios to long pulse operation…
In tokamaks, modification of the plasma profiles can reduce plasma transport, improving particle confinement. However, this improvement is still not completely understood. In this work, we consider a drift wave test particle model to…
A challenging and fundamental research problem is the better understanding and control of the turbulent transport of heat in present-day tokamak fusion experiments. Recent developments in numerical methods along with enormous gains in…
Microtearing instability is one of the major sources of turbulent transport in high-$\beta$ tokamaks. These modes lead to very localized transport at low-order rational magnetic field lines, and we show that flattening of the local electron…
Nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations have been conducted to investigate turbulent transport in tokamak plasmas with rotational shear. At sufficiently large flow shears, linear instabilities are suppressed, but transiently growing modes drive…
Based on the analysis of a large number of high-fidelity nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations, we propose a novel strategy to improve confinement in spherical tokamak plasmas by combining up-down asymmetric flux surface shaping with the Low…
Spherical tokamaks (STs) have been shown to possess properties desirable for a fusion power plant such as achieving high plasma ? and having increased vertical stability. To understand the confinement properties that might be expected in…
Tokamak plasmas with strong negative triangularity (NT) shaping typically exhibit fundamentally different edge behavior than conventional L-mode or H-mode plasmas. Over the entire DIII-D database, plasmas with sufficiently negative…
Direct evidence of micro-turbulence effect on the onset of neoclassical tearing mode (NTM) is reported for the first time in this letter. A puzzling positive correlation between critical width of seed island of NTM and normalized plasma…
Tokamak turbulence, driven by the ion-temperature gradient and occurring in the presence of flow shear, is investigated by means of local, ion-scale, electrostatic gyrokinetic simulations (with both kinetic ions and electrons) of the…
The edge plasma turbulence and transport dynamics, as well as the divertor power loads during the thermal quench phase of tokamak disruptions are numerically investigated with BOUT++'s flux-driven, six-field electromagnetic turbulence…
Local nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations of tokamak plasmas demonstrate that turbulent eddies can extend along magnetic field lines for hundreds of poloidal turns when the magnetic shear is very small. By accurately modeling different field…
Negative triangularity tokamak plasmas feature naturally enhanced confinement in the so-called L-mode regime, irrespective of the power of external heating. This is in contrast to conventional scenarios, which require exceeding a given…
Electromagnetic microtearing modes (MTMs) have been observed in many different spherical tokamak regimes. Understanding how these and other electromagnetic modes nonlinearly saturate is likely critical in understanding the confinement of a…
Designing economical magnetic confinement fusion power plants motivates computational tools that can estimate plasma behavior from engineering parameters without direct reliance on experimental measurement of the plasma profiles. In this…
Microturbulence can produce stationary fine-scale radial corrugations on the plasma density and temperature gradients in magnetic confinement fusion devices. We show that these structures play a significant role in regulating turbulent…
The understanding of cross-field transport is crucial in order to optimize the properties of magnetic confinement in modern fusion devices. In this work, a two-dimensional, simplified model is used to study the turbulent dynamics in the…
Effects of reversed magnetic shear on the plasma rotation stabilization of resistive wall modes in tokamaks are investigated using the AEGIS code. MHD equilibria in toroidal configuration from circular cross-sections to realistic CFETR-like…
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…
Strongly-shaped diverted negative triangularity (NT) plasmas in the DIII-D tokamak demonstrate simultaneous access to high normalized current, pressure, density, and confinement. NT plasmas are shown to exist across an expansive parameter…