Turbulent transport of alpha particles in tokamak plasmas

TL;DR

This paper models the turbulent transport of alpha particles in tokamak plasmas using a semi-analytical approach, revealing significant transport only at energies around 100 keV.

Contribution

It introduces a semi-analytical decorrelation trajectory method adapted to gyrokinetics for analyzing alpha particle transport in turbulence.

Findings

Significant alpha particle transport occurs at energies around 100 keV.

Transport coefficients depend on turbulence parameters and particle energy.

The model incorporates realistic turbulence spectra from numerical simulations.

Abstract

We investigate the ExB diffusion of fusion born \alpha particles in tokamak plasmas. We determine the transport regimes for a realistic model that has the characteristics of the ion temperature gradient (ITG) or of the trapped electron modes (TEM) driven turbulence. It includes a spectrum of potential fluctuations that is modeled using the results of the numerical simulations, the drift of the potential with the effective diamagnetic velocity and the parallel motion. Our semi-analytical statistical approach is based on the decorrelation trajectory method (DTM), which is adapted to the gyrokinetic approximation. We obtain the transport coefficients as a function of the parameters of the turbulence and of the energy of the \alpha particle. According to our results, signficant turbulent transport of the \alpha particles can appear only at energies of the order of 100KeV. We determine the corresponding conditions.