Taming Drift Wave Turbulence

Abstract

Drift waves in magnetized plasmas often occur in a turbulent form and are often considered as being responsible for anomalous cross-field particle transport. It is thus very appealing to achieve active control of the drift wave dynamics. A control scheme acting both in space and in time is developed to synchronize drift wave turbulence. It consists of an arrangement of eight electrodes (octupole exciter) in flush-mounted geometry in the edge region of the magnetized plasma column. The electrodes of the octupole exciter are driven by sinusoidal signals. Between each two neighbouring electrodes, the phase shift of the exciter signal is kept fixed. It is demonstrated experimentally that the exciter signals have strong influence on the different drift wave states, i.e. the turbulent states can be synchronized to a single preselected drift wave mode. The efficiency of the spatiotemporal synchronization is sensitively dependent on both driver frequency and phase shift.