The use of the Biorthogonal Decomposition for the identification of zonal flows at TJ-II

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel method combining biorthogonal decomposition and Hilbert transform techniques to identify and distinguish zonal flows from other global modes in fusion plasma measurements, validated with simulations and experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach for unambiguously identifying zonal flows in fusion plasmas using multipoint measurements and advanced signal processing techniques.

Findings

First unambiguous identification of a zonal flow at TJ-II.

Successful application of the method to gyro-kinetic simulations.

Effective separation of propagating modes from non-propagating zonal flows.

Abstract

This work addresses the identification of zonal flows in fusion plasmas. Zonal flows are large scale phenomena, hence multipoint measurements taken at remote locations are required for their identification. Given such data, the Biorthogonal Decomposition (or Singular Value Decomposition) is capable of extracting the globally correlated component of the multipoint fluctuations. By using a novel quadrature technique based on the Hilbert transform, propagating global modes (such as MHD modes) can be distinguished from the non-propagating, synchronous (zonal flow-like) global component. The combination of these techniques with further information such as the spectrogram and the spatial structure then allows an unambiguous identification of the zonal flow component of the fluctuations. The technique is tested using gyro-kinetic simulations. The first unambiguous identification of a zonal flow at the TJ-II stellarator is presented, based on multipoint Langmuir probe measurements.