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Register a new userEffect of superthermality on nonlinear electrostatic modes in plasmas
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The nonlinear propagation of electron-acoustic solitary structures is investigated in a plasma containing kappa-distributed (superthermal) electrons. Different types of localized structures are shown to exist. The occurrence of modulational instability is investigated.
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Nonlinear edge localized modes in a tokamak are examined using global three-dimensional resistive magnetohydrodynamics simulations. Coherent current-carrying filament (ribbon-like) structures wrapped around the torus are nonlinearly formed due to nonaxisymmetric reconnecting current sheet instabilities, the so called peeling-like edge localized modes. These fast growing modes saturate by breaking axisymmetric current layers isolated near the plasma edge and go through repetitive relaxation cycles by expelling current radially outward and relaxing it back. The local bi-directional fluctuation-induced electromotive force (emf) from the edge localized modes, the dynamo action, relaxes the axisymmetric current density and forms current holes near the edge.
The nonlinear dynamo effect of tearing modes is derived with the resistive MHD equations. The dynamo effect is divided into two parts, parallel and perpendicular to the magnetic field. Firstly, the force-free plasma is considered. It is found that the parallel dynamo effect drives opposite current densities at the different sides of the rational surface, making the $lambda =boldsymbol{j}cdotboldsymbol{B}/|boldsymbol{B}|^2$ profile completely flattened near the rational surface. There are many rational surfaces for the turbulent plasma, which means the plasma is tending to relax into the Taylor state. In contrast, a bit far from the rational surface, the parallel dynamo effect is much smaller, and the nonlinear dynamo form approximates the quasilinear form. Secondly, the pressure gradient is included. It is found that rather than the $lambda$ profile, the $boldsymbol{j}cdotboldsymbol{B}$ profile is flattened by the parallel dynamo effect. Besides, the perpendicular dynamo effect of tearing modes is found to eliminate the pressure gradient near the rational surface. In addition, our result also provides another basis for the assumption that current density is flat in the magnetic island for the tearing modes theory.
A linear gyrokinetic particle-in-cell scheme, which is valid for arbitrary perpendicular wavelength $k_perprho_i$ and includes the parallel dynamic along the field line, is developed to study the local electrostatic drift modes in point and ring dipole plasmas. We find the most unstable mode in this system can be either electron mode or ion mode. The properties and relations of these modes are studied in detail as a function of $k_perprho_i$, the density gradient $kappa_n$, the temperature gradient $kappa_T$, electron to ion temperature ratio $tau=T_e/T_i$, and mass ratio $m_i/m_e$. For conventional weak gradient parameters, the mode is on ground state (with eigenstate number $l=0$) and especially $k_parallelsim0$ for small $k_perprho_i$. Thus, bounce averaged dispersion relation is also derived for comparison. For strong gradient and large $k_perprho_i$, most interestingly, higher order eigenstate modes with even (e.g., $l=2,4$) or odd (e.g., $l=1$) parity can be most unstable, which is not expected by previous studies. High order eigenstate can also easily be most unstable at weak gradient when $tau>10$. This work can be particularly important to understand the turbulent transport in laboratory and space magnetosphere.
In the solar wind plasma an excess of kinetic temperature along the background magnetic field stimulates proton firehose modes to grow if the parallel plasma beta parameter is sufficiently high, i.e., $beta_{p parallel}gtrsim 1$. This instability can prevent the expansion-driven anisotropy from increasing indefinitely, and explain the observations. Moreover, such kinetic instabilities are expected to be even more effective in the presence of suprathermal Kappa-distributed populations, which are ubiquitous in the solar wind, are less affected by collisions than the core population, but contribute with an additional free energy. In this work we use both linear and extended quasi-linear (QL) frameworks to characterize the unstable periodic proton firehose modes (propagating parallel to the magnetic field) under the influence of suprathermal protons. Linear theory predicts a systematic stimulation of the instability, suprathermals amplifying the growth rates and decreasing the instability thresholds to lower anisotropies and lower plasma betas ($beta_{p parallel}<1$). In perfect agreement with these results, the QL approach reveals a significant enhancement of the resulting electromagnetic fluctuations up to the saturation with a stronger back reaction on protons, leading also to a faster and more efficient relaxation of the temperature anisotropy.
The turbulence-induced quasi-linear particle flux of a highly-charged, collisional impurity species is calculated from the electrostatic gyrokinetic equation including collisions with the bulk ions and the impurities themselves. The equation is solved by an expansion in powers of the impurity charge number $Z$. In this formalism, the collision operator only affects the impurity flux through the dynamics of the impurities in the direction parallel to the magnetic field. At reactor-relevant collisionality, the parallel dynamics is dominated by the parallel electric field, and collisions have a minor effect on the turbulent particle flux of highly-charged, collisional impurities.
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