Kinetic effects on geodesic acoustic mode from combined collisions and impurities

Abstract

The dispersion relation for geodesic acoustic mode (GAM) is derived by applying a gyrokinetic model that accounts for the effects from both collisions and impurities. Based on the dispersion relation, an analysis is performed for the non-monotonic behavior of GAM damping versus the characteristic collision rate at various impurity levels. As the effective charge increases, the maximum damping rate is found to shift towards lower collision rates, nearer to the parameter range of a typical tokamak edge plasma. The relative strengths of ion-ion and impurity-induced collision effects, which are illustrated by numerical calculations, are found to be comparable. Impurity-induced collisions help decrease the frequency of GAM, while their effects on the damping rate are non-monotonic, resulting in a weaker total damping in the high collision regime. The results presented suggest considering collision effects as well as impurity effects in GAM analysis.