Effects of magnetic drift tangential to magnetic surfaces on neoclassical transport in non-axisymmetric plasmas

TL;DR

This paper develops a new local formulation for neoclassical transport simulations that includes the tangential magnetic drift, revealing its significant impact in non-axisymmetric plasmas and negligible effect in tokamaks.

Contribution

A novel local drift kinetic simulation method incorporating tangential magnetic drift effects in non-axisymmetric plasmas is proposed.

Findings

Tangential magnetic drift has negligible effect in tokamaks.

It significantly alters neoclassical transport dependence on radial electric field in non-axisymmetric systems.

The peaked flux behavior at zero electric field is removed when including the drift.

Abstract

In evaluating neoclassical transport by radially-local simulations, the magnetic drift tangential to a flux surface is usually ignored in order to keep the phase-space volume conservation. In this paper, effect of the tangential magnetic drift on the local neoclassical transport are investigated. To retain the effect of the tangential magnetic drift in the local treatment of neoclassical transport, a new local formulation for the drift kinetic simulation is developed. The compressibility of the phase-space volume caused by the tangential magnetic drift is regarded as a source term for the drift kinetic equation, which is solved by using a two-weight $\delta f$ Monte Carlo method for non-Hamiltonian system [G.~Hu and J.~A.~Krommes, Phys. Plasmas $\rm \textbf{1}$, 863 (1994)]. It is demonstrated that the effect of the drift is negligible for the neoclassical transport in tokamaks. In non-axisymmetric systems, however, the tangential magnetic drift substantially changes the dependence of the neoclassical transport on the radial electric field $E_{\rm r}$. The peaked behavior of the neoclassical radial fluxes around $E_{\rm r} = 0$ observed in conventional local neoclassical transport simulations is removed by taking the tangential magnetic drift into account.