1. Stellarator microinstabilities and turbulence at low magnetic shear
- Author
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B. J. Faber, Chris Hegna, Jose E. Roman, M. J. Pueschel, and Paul Terry
- Subjects
Physics ,Plasma instabilities ,Turbulence ,Electron ,Mechanics ,Condensed Matter Physics ,Curvature ,01 natural sciences ,010305 fluids & plasmas ,law.invention ,Shear (sheet metal) ,Helically Symmetric Experiment ,law ,0103 physical sciences ,Plasma nonlinear phenomena ,CIENCIAS DE LA COMPUTACION E INTELIGENCIA ARTIFICIAL ,Plasma simulation ,010306 general physics ,Saturation (magnetic) ,Stellarator ,Envelope (waves) - Abstract
[EN] Gyrokinetic simulations of drift waves in low-magnetic-shear stellarators reveal that simulation domains comprised of multiple turns can be required to properly resolve critical mode structures important in saturation dynamics. Marginally stable eigenmodes important in saturation of ion temperature gradient modes and trapped electron modes in the Helically Symmetric Experiment (HSX) stellarator are observed to have two scales, with the envelope scale determined by the properties of the local magnetic shear and an inner scale determined by the interplay between the local shear and magnetic field-line curvature. Properly resolving these modes removes spurious growth rates that arise for extended modes in zero-magnetic-shear approximations, enabling use of a zero-magnetic-shear technique with smaller simulation domains and attendant cost savings. Analysis of subdominant modes in trapped electron mode (TEM)-driven turbulence reveals that the extended marginally stable modes play an important role in the nonlinear dynamics, and suggests that the properties induced by low magnetic shear may be exploited to provide another route for turbulence saturation., The authors would like to thank F. Jenko for insightful questions that motivated this research and J. Smoniewski and J. H. E. Proll for engaging discussions. This work was supported by US DoE grant nos. DE-FG02-99ER54546, DE-FG02-93ER54222 and DE-FG02-89ER53291. J.E.R. was supported by Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI) under grant TIN2016-75985-P, which includes European Commission ERDF funds. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a US Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility operated under contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231. This research was performed using the compute resources and assistance of the UW-Madison Center For High Throughput Computing (CHTC) in the Department of Computer Sciences. The CHTC is supported by UW-Madison, the Advanced Computing Initiative, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery and the National Science Foundation, and is an active member of the Open Science Grid, which is supported by the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy's Office of Science.
- Published
- 2018
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