A kinetic formalism of parametric decay of a large amplitude lower hybrid pump wave into runaway electron mode and a uppersideband mode is investigated. The pump and the sideband exert a ponderomotive force on runaway electrons, driving the runaway mode. The density perturbation associated with the latter beats with the oscillatory velocity due to the pump to produce the sideband. The finite parallel velocity spread of the runaway electrons turns the parametric instability into a stimulated compton scattering process where growth rate scales as the square of the pump amplitude. The large phase velocity waves thus generated can potentially generate relativistic electrons.
Parametric coupling of lower hybrid pump wave with low frequency collisionless/weakly collisional trapped electron drift wave, with frequency lower than the electron bounce frequency is studied. The coupling produces two lower hybrid sidebands. The sidebands beat with the pump to exert a low frequency ponderomotive force on electrons that causes a frequency shift in the drift wave, leading to the growth of the latter. The short wavelength modes are destabilized and they enhance the anomalous diffusion coefficient.
Improved understanding of runaway-electron formation and decay processes are of prime interest for the safe operation of large tokamaks, and the dynamics of the runaway electrons during dynamical scenarios such as disruptions are of particular concern. In this paper, we present kinetic modelling of scenarios with time-dependent plasma parameters; in particular, we investigate hot-tail runaway generation during a rapid drop in plasma temperature. With the goal of studying runaway-electron generation with a self-consistent electric-field evolution, we also discuss the implementation of a collision operator that conserves momentum and energy and demonstrate its properties. An operator for avalanche runaway-electron generation, which takes the energy dependence of the scattering cross section and the runaway distribution into account, is investigated. We show that the simplified avalanche model of Rosenbluth & Putvinskii [Nucl. Fusion 1997 37 1355] can give inaccurate results for the avalanche growth rate (either lower or higher) for many parameters, especially when the average runaway energy is modest, such as during the initial phase of the avalanche multiplication. The developments presented pave the way for improved modelling of runaway-electron dynamics during disruptions or other dynamic events.
Frequency upconversion of an electromagnetic wave can occur in ionized plasma with decreasing electric permittivity and in split-ring resonator-structure metamaterials with decreasing magnetic permeability. We develop a general theory to describe the evolution of the wave frequency, amplitude, and energy density in homogeneous media with a temporally decreasing refractive index. We find that upconversion of the wave frequency is necessarily accompanied by partitioning of the wave energy into low-frequency modes, which sets an upper limit on the energy conversion efficiency. The efficiency limits are obtained for both varying permittivity and varying permeability.
Following up on a proposal to use four-wave mixing in an underdense plasma at mildly relativistic laser intensities to produce vastly more energetic x-ray pulses [V. M. Malkin and N. J. Fisch, Phys. Rev. E, 101, 023211 (2020)], we perform the first numerical simulations in one dimension to demonstrate amplification of a short high frequency seed through four-wave mixing. We find that parasitic processes including phase modulation and spatial pulse slippage limit the amplification efficiency. We numerically explore the previously proposed dual seed configuration as a countermeasure against phase modulation. We show how this approach tends to be thwarted by longitudinal slippage. In the examples we considered, the best performance was in fact achieved through optimization of signal and pump parameters in a single seed configuration.
We investigate the effects of runaway electron current on the dispersion relation of resistive magnetohydrodynamic modes in tokamaks. We present a new theoretical model to derive the dispersion relation, which is based on the asymptotic analysis of the resistive layer structure of the modes. It is found that in addition to the conventional resistive layer, a new runaway current layer can emerge whose properties depend on the ratio of the Alfven velocity to the runaway electron convection speed. Due to the contribution from this layer, both the tearing mode and kink mode will have a real frequency in addition to a growth rate. The derived dispersion relation has been compared with numerical results using both a simplified eigenvalue calculation and a M3D-C1 linear simulation, and good agreement is found in both cases.