Analytic quasi-steady evolution of a marginally unstable wave in the presence of drag and scattering

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how drag influences the quasi-steady evolution of marginally unstable waves in plasma, simplifying the nonlinear equations and confirming the results through simulations, highlighting the importance of drag in fusion plasma models.

Contribution

It derives a simplified differential equation for wave evolution under drag, extending the Berk-Breizman model, and validates it with simulations, emphasizing drag's significance in plasma instability modeling.

Findings

Drag increases wave saturation amplitude.

Drag shifts the oscillation frequency of waves.

The simplified model agrees well with simulations.

Abstract

The 1D bump-on-tail problem is studied in order to determine the influence of drag on quasi-steady solutions near marginal stability ($1-\gamma_d/\gamma_L\ll 1$) when effective collisions are much larger than the instability growth rate ($\nu \gg \gamma$). In this common tokamak regime, it is rigorously shown that the paradigmatic Berk-Breizman cubic equation for the nonlinear mode evolution reduces to a much simpler differential equation, dubbed the time-local cubic equation, which can be solved directly. It is found that in addition to increasing the saturation amplitude, drag introduces a shift in the apparent oscillation frequency by modulating the saturated wave envelope. Excellent agreement is found between the analytic solution for the mode evolution and both the numerically integrated Berk-Breizman cubic equation and fully nonlinear 1D Vlasov simulations. Experimentally isolating the contribution of drag to the saturated mode amplitude for verification purposes is explored but complicated by the reality that the amount of drag can not be varied independently of other key parameters in realistic scenarios. While the effect of drag is modest when the ratio of drag to scattering $\alpha/\nu$ is very small, it can become substantial when $\alpha/\nu \gtrsim 0.5$, suggesting that drag should be accounted for in quantitative models of fast-ion-driven instabilities in fusion plasmas.