Plasma transport near the separatrix of a magnetic island

Abstract

The simplest nontrivial model of transport across a magnetic island chain in the presence of collisionless streaming along the magnetic field is solved by a Wiener–Hopf procedure. The solution found is valid provided the boundary layer about the island separatrix is narrow compared to the island width. The result demonstrates that when this assumption is satisfied the flattened profile region is reduced by the boundary layer width. The calculation is similar to the recent work by Fitzpatrick [Phys. Plasmas 2, 825 (1995)] but is carried out in the collisionless, rather than the collisional, limit of parallel transport, and determines the plasma parameters on the separatrix self-consistently.