Excitation of Zonal Flow by Intermediate-Scale Toroidal Electron Temperature Gradient Turbulence

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that intermediate-scale toroidal ETG turbulence can effectively excite zonal flows in tokamak plasmas, using a gyrokinetic approach that clarifies previous fluid approximation limitations.

Contribution

It introduces a gyrokinetic analysis leading to a nonlinear Schrödinger equation for ETG turbulence, revealing zonal flow excitation mechanisms overlooked by fluid models.

Findings

Zonal flows are preferentially excited by intermediate-scale ETG turbulence.

Gyrokinetic analysis provides a more accurate description than fluid models.

Results align with recent multi-scale gyrokinetic simulation observations.

Abstract

We show that zonal flow can be preferentially excited by intermediate-scale toroidal electron temperature gradient (ETG) turbulence in tokamak plasmas. Previous theoretical studies that yielded an opposite conclusion assumed a fluid approximation for ETG modes. Here, we carry out a gyrokinetic analysis which ultimately yields a nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger equation for the ETG dynamics with a Navier-Stokes type nonlinearity. For typical tokamak parameters, it is found that zonal flow generation plays an important role in the intermediate-scale ETG turbulence. This finding offers an explanation for recent multi-scale gyrokinetic simulations.