E. G. Highcock M. Barnes F. I. Parra A. A. Schekochihin C. M. Roach et al.
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, because in the former case the component of the sheared toroidal flow that is perpendicular to the magnetic field h…
PublishedE. G. Highcock M. Barnes A. A. Schekochihin F. I. Parra C. M. Roach S.C. Cowley
The effect of flow shear on turbulent transport in tokamaks is studied numerically in the experimentally relevant limit of zero magnetic shear. It is found that the plasma is linearly stable for all nonzero flow shear values, but that subcritical turbulence can be sustained nonlinearly at a wide range of temperature gradients. Flow shear increases …
PublishedM.Barnes I.G.Abel W.Dorland T.Görler G.W.Hammett F.Jenko
Direct coupling between a transport solver and local, nonlinear gyrokinetic calculations using the multiscale gyrokinetic code TRINITY [M. Barnes, “TRINITY: A unified treatment of turbulence, transport, and heating in magnetized plasmas,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Maryland, (2008) eprint arXiv:0901.2868] is described. The coupling of the micr…
PublishedM.Barnes W.Dorland T.Tatsuno
Many plasmas of interest to the astrophysical and fusion communities are weakly collisional. In such plasmas, small scales can develop in the distribution of particle velocities, potentially affecting observable quantities such as turbulent fluxes. Consequently, it is necessary to monitor velocity space resolution in gyrokinetic simulations. In thi…
PublishedT. Tatsuno W. Dorland A. A. Schekochihin G. G. Plunk M. Barnes S. C. Cowley G. G. Howes
Electrostatic turbulence in weakly collisional, magnetized plasma can be interpreted as a cascade of entropy in phase space, which is proposed as a universal mechanism for dissipation of energy in magnetized plasma turbulence. When the nonlinear decorrelation time at the scale of the thermal Larmor radius is shorter than the collision time, a broad…
PublishedM. Barnes I. G. Abel W. Dorland D. R. Ernst G. W. Hammett P. Ricci B. N. Rogers A. A. Schekochihin T. Tatsuno
A set of key properties for an ideal dissipation scheme in gyrokinetic simulations is proposed, and implementation of a model collision operator satisfying these properties is described. This operator is based on the exact linearized test-particle collision operator, with approximations to the field-particle terms that preserve conservation laws an…
PublishedI. G. Abel M. Barnes S. C. Cowley W. Dorland A. A. Schekochihin
A new analytically and numerically manageable model collision operator is developed specifically for turbulence simulations. The like-particle collision operator includes both pitch-angle scattering and energy diffusion and satisfies the physical constraints required for collision operators: it conserves particles, momentum, and energy, obeys Boltz…
PublishedI. G. Abel M. Barnes S. C. Cowley W. Dorland G. W. Hammett A. A. Schekochihin T. Tatsuno
We motivate the need to include collisional dissipation in gyrokinetic turbulence simulations, and constract criteria for a physically vaUd model of such dissipation. A new analytically manageable operator satisfying those criteria is presented and transformed into gyrokinetic variables. The form of conservation laws for collision operators in gyro…
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