On the 3D turbulence regime in a Tokamak plasma edge

TL;DR

This paper derives a simplified 3D turbulence model for Tokamak plasma edges, demonstrating that 2D electrostatic turbulence acts as an attractor for the 3D dynamics, highlighting the dominance of 2D turbulence in the nonlinear drift response.

Contribution

It introduces a reduced 3D model equivalent to a Hasegawa-Wakatani system, analyzing the transition from 3D to 2D turbulence in Tokamak edges.

Findings

Existence of a decaying 3D turbulence branch with a 2D spectrum as attractor

The 2D electrostatic turbulence is the fundamental component of the nonlinear drift response

The model simplifies the understanding of turbulence dynamics in the plasma edge

Abstract

We derive a reduced model for the electrostatic turbulence in a Tokamak edge, when dealing with a resistive plasma and neglecting the spatial gradient of the background density which triggers the linear drift wave response. The obtained dynamics, de facto equivalent to a Hasegawa-Wakatani model, is characterized by a constitutive relation between the electric potential Laplacian and the density, which allows to deal with a single 3D equation governing the electric potential fluctuations. We study the evolution of the model, by separating the $n=0$ ($n$ indicating toroidal-like number) mode from all the other ones. Then, we linearize the dynamics of the $n\neq 0$ modes around the steady 2D spectrum, which describes the spectral features of the electrostatic 2D turbulence. We theoretically and numerically demonstrate the existence of decaying branch of the 3D turbulence, having such a 2D steady spectrum as a natural attractor. This result suggests that the basic constituent of the self-sustained non-linear drift response in the plasma edge has to be individualized in the non-linear 2D electrostatic turbulence.