Kinetic simulation of parallel transport and ELM propagation in the Alcator C-Mod tokamak

Abstract

The Fokker-Planck code ALLA [1] is employed to investigate parallel electron transport for plasma parameters and connection lengths typical of the Alcator C-Mod tokamak. A non-stationary 1D-2V purely kinetic model of scrape-off layer (SOL) plasmas is adopted which takes into account e-e and e-i Coulomb collisions, the self-consistent parallel electric field, and the sheath potential. We numerically study the effects of an enhanced (or depleted) suprathermal tail of the electron distribution on the Langmuir divertor and fast-scanning (FS) probe measurements, and edge localized mode (ELM) bursts.