Profile stiffness and global confinement

This paper analyses the properties of a critical gradient transport model based on a few assumptions: electrostatic gyroBohm scaling law, existence of an instability threshold and finite background transport below the threshold. A quantitative criterion of stiffness is proposed, which provides the means for a quantitative assessment and inter-machine comparison. It is also shown that this transport model is compatible with a two-term scaling law of global confinement, as proposed recently by the International Tokamak Physics Activity–Confinement Data Base and Modelling Topical Group. This model has also been applied to analyse a variety of experiments mostly using electron heat modulation on JET, ASDEX-Upgrade, TORE SUPRA and FTU. The thresholds are found to be in the expected domain for micro-instabilities in tokamaks. However, the stiffness factor is found to cover a broad range of variation.