Plasma and Fluid Turbulence: Theory and Modelling

Abstract

The area of turbulence has been covered by many books over the years. This has, of course, mainly been fluid turbulence, while the area of plasma turbulence has been treated much less. This book by Yoshizawa et al covers both plasma and fluid turbulence, in a way that does justice to both areas at the same time as cross-disciplinary aspects are illuminated. The book should be useful to physicists working in both areas partly because it examines fundamental aspects in a pedagogical way, partly because it is up to date and partly because of the cross-disciplinary aspects which enrich both areas. It is written as an advanced textbook. The reader should have previous knowledge of at least one of the areas and also some background in statistical physics.The book starts with the very important and highly up to date area of structure formation which is relevant both to fluids and plasmas. Here, pipe flow of fluids is treated as an introduction to the area, then follows discussion of the generation of magnetic fields by turbulent motion in stellar objects and stucture formation in plasmas confined by a magnetic field. Also the concept of bifurcation is introduced. This part builds up knowledge from the simple fluid case to the problems of magnetic confinement of plasmas in a very pedagogical way. It continues by introducing the fundamentals of fluid turbulence. This is done very systematically and concepts useful for industrial applications like the K-e method and several ways of heuristic modelling are introduced. Also the two dimensional vortex equation, which is also relevant to magnetized plasmas is introduced. In chapter 5 the statistical theory of turbulence is treated. It starts with a very nice and easy to understand example of renormalization of a simple nonlinear equation where the exact solution is known. It introduces the method of partial renormalization, Greens functions and the direct interaction approximation (DIA).The book then continues with an extensive description of dynamo theory in Magnetohydrodynamic turbulence. This area has applications both in geophysics and plasma confinement by magnetic fields. The most well known example being the reversed field pinch. This part is fundamental in several respects and the principle of relaxation of the turbulence to quasi stationary states that can be predicted theoretically is very elegant. The problem of rotation of magnetized plasmas and its importance for obtaining internal transport barriers is also treated here. This part is entirely described by the one-fluid magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations.The next part deals with plasma turbulence. It starts from the Braginskii collisional fluid equations. These are then reduced for typical cases of quasi two dimensional plasma turbulence where the magnetic perturbations can be described by a vector potential which is parallel to the unperturbed magnetic field. Also a couple of well known sets of nonlinear electrostatic systems for drift waves are presented as well as a gyro-averaged kinetic description for inhomogeneous plasmas. Then, several low frequency eigenmodes in magnetized plasmas are described and finally the quasilinear theory of transport is presented. The following part deals with strongly nonlinear phenomena in inhomogeneous plasma turbulence. Here, concepts of importance for confinement such as convective cells, zonal flows and streamers are presented. As a natural continuation, renormalization and scale invariance methods for strongly nonlinear plasmas are given. Also non-Markovian properties are discussed. This is natural since turbulence in inhomogeneous plasmas typically has a rather large real eigenfrequency leading to memory of the wave phase.The next part deals with plasma turbulence driven by inhomogeneities. This is followed by a new part on flows where the flows this time are generated by the turbulence which is driven by plasma inhomogeneities. In particular flows driven by such instabilities can in turn suppress the instabilities leading to an intermittent type of dynamics. In chapter 21 the authors finally come to one of their special interests, subcritical, or nonlinear, excitation of turbulence. This is mainly of interest in plasma regimes where there are no strong instabilities or in order to explain magnetic perturbations in situations where only electrostatic modes are linearly unstable. The final part of the book deals mainly with statistical aspects of plasma turbulence, starting with bifurcation and including discussions of the transition from an L-mode (low confinement) to an H-mode (high confinement state) of magnetic confinement of plasmas. This is another area of special expertise of the authors and it is very well written, giving detailed information of the subject area.In conclusion I find the book to be both very pedagogical and very up to date. It can be strongly recommended to researchers who quickly want to reach the research front in plasma turbulence for magnetic confinement starting with only a basic knowledge of plasma or fluid dynamics. It has its main strengths in the fluid and MHD parts, as well as in the statistical descriptions.Jan Weiland