Nonlinear interplay of TEM and ITG turbulence and its effect on transport

The dominant source of anomalous transport in fusion plasmas on ion scales is turbulence driven by trapped electron modes (TEMs) and ion temperature gradient (ITG) modes. While the individual properties of each of these two instabilities and the corresponding microturbulence have been examined in detail in the past, the effects of a coexistence of the two modes and the phenomena of transitions between the TEM and ITG dominated regimes are not well studied. In many experimental situations, the temperature and density gradients support both microinstabilities simultaneously, so that transitional regimes are important for a detailed understanding of fusion plasmas. In this paper, this issue is addressed, using the gyrokinetic code GENE for a detailed investigation of the dominant and subdominant linear instabilities and the corresponding nonlinear system. A simple quasilinear model based on eigenvalue computations is presented which is shown to reproduce important features of the nonlinear TEM–ITG transition.

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