Turbulent transport of energetic ions

Abstract

Approaching ITER operation, the issue of anomalous transport of fast particles becomes more and more important. This is partly because the ITER heating and current drive system relies heavily on neutral beam injection. Moreover burning plasmas are heated by fast fusion α particles.Fusion α particles are characterised by a fixed energy and an isotropic velocity distribution. Therefore they have gyroradii one magnitude larger than the thermal ions. The dependency of the particle diffusion of α test particles on the Kubo number K = VE×Bτc/λc (VE×B mean E × B velocity, τc, λc correlation time and length of the turbulent potential) is presented. For different turbulent regimes, different dependency of the diffusion on the gyroradius is found. For large Kubo numbers, the transport is found to remain constant for gyroradii up to the correlation length of the potential, whereas it is drastically reduced in the small Kubo number regime.In the second part, a model for beam ions injected along the equilibrium magnet...