Abstract
New turbulence contributions to plasma transport and confinement in the spherical tokamak (ST) regime are identified through nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations. The drift wave Kelvin–Helmholtz (KH) mode characterized by intrinsic mode asymmetry is shown to drive significant ion thermal transport in strongly rotating national spherical torus experiment (NSTX) L-modes. The long wavelength, quasi-coherent dissipative trapped electron mode (TEM) is destabilized in NSTX H-modes despite the presence of strong shear, providing a robust turbulence source dominant over collisionless TEM. Dissipative trapped electron mode (DTEM)-driven transport in the NSTX parametric regime is shown to increase with electron collision frequency, offering one possible source for the confinement scaling observed in experiments. There exists a turbulence-free regime in the collision-induced collisionless trapped electron mode to DTEM transition for ST plasmas. This predicts a natural access to a minimum transport state in the low collisionality regime that future advanced STs may cover.
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