Quasi-linear Transport in a Sheared Flow Field

TL;DR

This paper investigates the evolution of a passive scalar in a sheared flow with many flux islands, revealing that quasilinear effects reduce perturbation sizes and lead to a saturated state with implications for particle confinement.

Contribution

It introduces a multiple scale expansion approach to analyze scalar transport in complex flow fields, showing limitations of standard approximations and the formation of a modified equilibrium.

Findings

Saturated state has smaller resonance layers than isolated cases.

Quasilinear response reduces effective perturbation size.

Long-term evolution may cease or lead to a non-diffusive equilibrium.

Abstract

The evolution of a passive scalar field is considered for a slowly varying stratified medium, which is convected in an incompressible sheared flow with many overlapping static flux islands. Within the quasilinear/random phase approximation, a multiple scale expansion is made. Due to the rapid spatial variation of the temperature, the "ensemble" averaged/ slowly varying part of the solution is not described by the arithmetic average of the oscillatory evolution equation. The standard Markovian and continuum approximations are shown to be invalid. For times of order $N$, where there are $O(N^2)$ excited modes, most of the time dependent perturbation phase mixes away and the fluid reaches a new saturated state with small time oscillations about the temperature. This saturated state has smaller resonance layers, (corresponding to magnetic islands) than those that occur in the isolated resonant perturbation case. Thus the quasilinear response to the resonant interactions reduces the effective size of the perturbations. The temperature gradient of the saturated state vanishes at all the excited resonance surfaces but has a nonzero average. Thus either the quasi-linear approximation ceases to be valid on long time scales, or the fluid remains essentially in this modified equilibrium and does not evolve diffusively. Thus collisionless, driftless fast particles will not be lost rapidly in equilibria with many small islands.