Barriers for the reduction of transport due to the EXB drift in magnetized plasmas

TL;DR

This paper models chaotic particle dynamics in magnetized plasmas and demonstrates that small control modifications to the electric field can create robust transport barriers, potentially improving plasma confinement without large-scale interventions.

Contribution

It introduces a control method that creates transport barriers in a Hamiltonian plasma model, avoiding the need for large-scale device modifications.

Findings

Small additive control terms can induce transport barriers.

Transport barriers are robust against perturbations.

The method offers an alternative to traditional internal transport barriers.

Abstract

We consider a 1 1/2degrees of freedom Hamiltonian dynamical system, which models the chaotic dynamics of charged test-particles in a turbulent electric field, across the confining magnetic field in controlled thermonuclear fusion devices. The external electric field E = \nabla\bigvee is modeled by a phenomenological potential V and the magnetic field B is considered uniform. It is shown that, by introducing a small additive control term to the external electric field, it is possible to create a transport barrier for this dynamical system. The robustness of this control method is also investigated. This theoretical study indicates that alternative transport barriers can be triggered without requiring a control action on the device scale as in present Internal Transport Barriers (ITB).