An efficient interface between the solvers of Maxwell’s equations and of the quasilinear kinetic equation for simulations of ion cyclotron heating in tokamak plasmas

Abstract

Selfconsistent simulations of ion–cyclotron heating of tokamak plasmas require iterating between a solver of the wave equations in toroidal geometry and a solver of the Fokker–Planck equation describing the evolution of the ion distribution functions. A huge amount of information must be exchanged between the two codes at each iteration. For the package TORIC–SSFPQL, we have developed an interface which substantially reduces the CPU and memory requirements for the storage and transmission of these data. We present this interface here, and we take advantage of its efficiency to compare simulations in which the quasilinear diffusion operator in SSFPQL is evaluated superposing the TORIC results for all relevant toroidal modes excited by a given antenna with simulations using the fields of a single “representative” toroidal mode.