Professor Felix Parra Diaz

Abstract:

In general, the orbit-averaged radial magnetic drift of trapped particles in stellarators is non-zero due to the three-dimensional nature of the magnetic field. Stellarators in which the orbit-averaged radial magnetic drift vanishes are called omnigeneous, and they exhibit neoclassical transport levels comparable to those of axisymmetric tokamaks. However, the effect of deviations from omnigeneity cannot be neglected in practice, and it is more deleterious at small collisionalities. For sufficiently low collision frequencies (below the values that define the 1/ν regime), the components of the drifts tangential to the flux surface become relevant. This article focuses on the study of such collisionality regimes in stellarators close to omnigeneity when the gradient of the non-omnigeneous perturbation is small. First, it is proven that closeness to omnigeneity is required to actually preserve radial locality in the drift-kinetic equation for collisionalities below the 1/ν regime. Then, using the derived radially local equation, it is shown that neoclassical transport is determined by two layers located at different regions of phase space. One of the layers corresponds to the so-called √ν regime and the other to the so-called superbanana-plateau regime. The importance of the superbanana-plateau layer for the calculation of the tangential electric field is emphasized, as well as the relevance of the latter for neoclassical transport in the collisionality regimes considered in this paper. In particular, the role of the tangential electric field is essential for the emergence of a new subregime of superbanana-plateau transport when the radial electric field is small. A formula for the ion energy flux that includes the √ν regime and the superbanana-plateau regime is given. The energy flux scales with the square of the size of the deviation from omnigeneity. Finally, it is explained why below a certain collisionality value the formulation presented in this article ceases to be valid.

Abstract:

The bootstrap current and flow velocity of a low-collisionality stellarator plasma are calculated. As far as possible, the analysis is carried out in a uniform way across all low-collisionality regimes in general stellarator geometry, assuming only that the confinement is good enough that the plasma is approximately in local thermodynamic equilibrium. It is found that conventional expressions for the ion flow speed and bootstrap current in the low-collisionality limit are accurate only in the $1/\nu$-collisionality regime and need to be modified in the $\sqrt{\nu}$-regime. The correction due to finite collisionality is also discussed and is found to scale as $\nu^{2/5}$.

Abstract:

Introducing up–down asymmetry into the tokamak magnetic equilibria appears to be a feasible method to drive fast intrinsic toroidal rotation in future large devices. In this paper we investigate how the intrinsic momentum transport generated by up–down asymmetric shaping scales with the mode number of the shaping effects. Making use the gyrokinetic tilting symmetry (Ball et al 2016 Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion 58 045023), we study the effect of envelopes created by the beating of different high-order shaping effects. This reveals that the presence of an envelope can change the scaling of the momentum flux from exponentially small in the limit of large shaping mode number to just polynomially small. This enhancement of the momentum transport requires the envelope to be both up–down asymmetric and have a spatial scale on the order of the minor radius.