Numerical simulations of tokamak plasma turbulence and internal transport barriers

A wide variety of magnetically confined plasmas, including many tokamaks such as the JET, TFTR, JT-60U, DIII-D, RTP, show clear evidence for the existence of the so-called `internal transport barriers' (ITBs) which are regions of relatively good confinement, associated with substantial gradients in temperature and/or density. A computational approach to investigating the properties of tokamak plasma turbulence and transport is developed. This approach is based on the evolution of global, two-fluid, nonlinear, electromagnetic plasma equations of motion with specified sources. In this paper, the computational model is applied to the problem of determining the nature and physical characteristics of barrier phenomena, with particular reference to RTP (electron-cyclotron resonance heated) and JET (neutral beam heated) observations of ITBs. The simulations capture features associated with the formation of these ITBs, and qualitatively reproduce some of the observations made on RTP and JET. The picture of plasma turbulence suggested involves variations of temperature and density profiles induced by the electromagnetic fluctuations, on length scales intermediate between the system size and the ion Larmor radius, and time scales intermediate between the confinement time and the Alfven time (collectively termed `mesoscales'). The back-reaction of such profile `corrugations' (features exhibiting relatively high local spatial gradients and rapid time variations) on the development and saturation of the turbulence itself plays a key role in the nonlinear dynamics of the system. The corrugations are found to modify the dynamical evolution of radial electric field shear and the bootstrap current density, which in turn influence the turbulence. The interaction is mediated by relatively long wavelength, electromagnetic modes excited by an inverse cascade and involving nonlinear instabilities and relaxation phenomena such as intermittency and internal mode locking.