Transport properties of a hollow pressure filament in a magnetized plasma

Abstract

A theoretical and numerical modeling study is made of a novel heating configuration recently implemented in the Large Plasma Device at the University of California, Los Angeles. The injection of an electron beam from a masked LaB6 cathode into a magnetized plasma results in a hollow, cylindrical filament of elevated temperature. The hot cylindrical ring has an axial extent that is about one-thousand times larger than its thickness, and the peak temperature can be ten times larger than that of the surrounding plasma. The simultaneous positive and negative radial pressure gradients provide an ideal platform for the investigation of transport phenomena of contemporary interest, including avalanches [Van Compernolle et al., Phys. Rev. E 91, 031102 (2015)] and nonlocal transport. The present study delineates both the parameter regimes achievable by classical transport and the linear stability of the self-consistent profiles, including temperature and density gradients. An avalanche model is developed based on the self-consistent evolution of drift-wave eigenfunctions in nonlinearly modified profiles of electron temperature and plasma density.