Drift wave soliton formation via forced-driven zonal flow and implication on plasma confinement

TL;DR

This paper develops a gyrokinetic model of drift wave self-regulation via forced zonal flows, revealing how plasma nonuniformity influences soliton formation and turbulence spreading in tokamaks.

Contribution

It introduces a nonlinear Schrödinger equation incorporating plasma nonuniformity effects, providing new insights into drift wave soliton formation and limitations in realistic plasma conditions.

Findings

Drift wave envelope solitons can form due to nonlinear balance.

Solitons are confined within wave packet turning points in nonuniform plasmas.

Threshold amplitude for soliton formation is within tokamak experimental parameters.

Abstract

In this work, gyrokinetic theory of drift waves (DWs) self-regulation via the forced driven zonal flow (ZF) is presented, and finite diamagnetic drift frequency due to plasma nonuniformity is shown to play dominant role in ZF forced generation. The obtained nonlinear DW equation is a nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation, in which the linear dispersiveness, linear growth, nonuniformity of diamagnetic drift frequency, and cubic nonlinearity induced by feedback of forced-driven ZF to DWs are self-consistently included. The nonlinear DW equation is solved numerically in both uniform and nonuniform plasmas. It is shown that DWenvelope soliton may form due to the balance of linear dispersiveness and nonlinearity, and lead to turbulence spreading to linearly stable region. It is further found that though the threshold on DW amplitude for soliton formation is well within the relevant parameter regimes of realistic tokamak experiments, solitons can not extend beyond the range bounded by the turning points of the wave packet when plasma nonuniformity is self-consistently accounted for.