Regulating drift-wave plasma turbulence into spatiotemporal patterns by pinning coupling

Abstract

Using the technique of pinning coupling in chaos control, we investigate how the two-dimensional drift-wave plasma turbulence described by the Hasegawa-Mima equation can be regulated into different spatiotemporal patterns. It is shown both analytically and numerically that, depending on the pattern structure of the target, the pinning strength necessary for regulating the turbulence could have a large variation. More specifically, with the increase of the wave number of the target, the critical pinning strength is found to be increased by a power-law scaling. Moreover, in both the transition and transient process of the pinning regulation, the modes of the turbulence are found to be suppressed in a hierarchical fashion, that is, by the sequence of mode wave number. The findings give insight into the dynamics of drift-wave turbulence, as well as indicative to the design of new control techniques for real-world turbulence.