Physical processes determining plasma confinement in tokamaks with transport barriers from the point of view of self-organization

Abstract

The goal of this article is to describe processes linked to energy confinement in tokamak plasmas from the perspective of self-organization—the main process that determines the behavior of turbulent plasmas. In the paper Razumova et al 2020 Plasma Phys. Rep. 46 337, such an analysis was performed for regimes without transport barriers. The present paper extends this approach to regimes with barriers and magnetic islands. In a shorter version, it was presented in Razumova et al 2020 Entropy 22 53, which showed that the appearance of islands in the inner part of the barrier is directly related to the formation of the barrier and limits its growth. We discuss the structure of the radial heat flux that carries energy from the plasma in such a way that the pressure profile remains close to the self-consistent profile (as observed in the experiment).