Gyro-water-bag approach in nonlinear gyrokinetic turbulence

Abstract

Turbulent transport is a key issue for controlled thermonuclear fusion based on magnetic confinement. The thermal confinement of a magnetized fusion plasma is essentially determined by the turbulent heat conduction across the equilibrium magnetic field. It has long been acknowledged, that the prediction of turbulent transport requires to solve Vlasov-type gyrokinetic equations. Although the kinetic description is more accurate than fluid models (MHD, gyro-fluid), because among other things it takes into account nonlinear resonant wave–particle interaction, kinetic modeling has the drawback of a huge computer resource request. An unifying approach consists in considering water-bag-like weak solutions of kinetic collisionless equations, which allow to reduce the full kinetic Vlasov equation into a set of hydrodynamic equations, while keeping its kinetic behaviour. As a result this exact reduction induces a multi-fluid numerical resolution cost. Therefore finding water-bag-like weak solutions of the gyrokinetic equations leads to the birth of the gyro-water-bag model. This model is suitable for studying linear and nonlinear low-frequency micro-instabilities and the associated anomalous transport in magnetically-confined plasmas. The present paper addresses the derivation of the nonlinear gyro-water-bag model, its quasilinear approximation and their numerical approximations by Runge–Kutta semi-Lagrangian methods and Runge–Kutta discontinuous Galerkin schemes respectively.