Study on the creation and destruction of transport barriers via the effective safety factors for energetic particles

Abstract

Charged particles with low kinetic energy move along the magnetic field lines, but so do not the energetic particles. We investigate the topological structure changes in the phase space of energetic particles with respect to the magnetic one. For this study, cylindrical magnetic fields with non-monotonic safety factors that induce the magnetic internal transport barrier are considered. We show that the topological structure of the magnetic field line and of the particle trajectories can be quite different. We explain this difference using the concept of an effective particle q-profile. Using this notion, we can investigate the location and existence of resonances for particle orbits that are different from the magnetic ones. These are examined both numerically by integrating an equation of motion and theoretically by the use of Alfvén's guiding center theory and by the use of an effective reduced Hamiltonian for the integrable unperturbed system. It is clarified that, for the energetic particles, the grad B drift effect shifts the resonances and the drift induced by curvature of the magnetic field line leads to the vanishing of the resonances. As a result, we give two different mechanisms that lead to the creation of transport barriers for energetic particles in the region where the magnetic field line is chaotic.