Gyrokinetic equilibria of high temperature superconducting magnetic mirrors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel multiscale method that significantly accelerates gyrokinetic equilibrium calculations for high-temperature superconducting magnetic mirrors, enabling detailed kinetic modeling of plasma behavior.

Contribution

The authors develop a multiscale approach that achieves a 30,000X speed-up in gyrokinetic equilibrium computations, facilitating new research in magnetic mirror plasma modeling.

Findings

Kinetic equilibrium and ion confinement time match analytic theory.

The method enables long-time scale simulations previously computationally infeasible.

Potential applications extend to tokamaks and stellarators.

Abstract

High-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets and other advances have led to renewed interest in magnetic mirrors for fusion energy. The non-Maxwellian nature of mirror plasmas necessitates kinetic modeling to predict, optimize and design mirrors. Explicit gyrokinetic full-f codes can be used to study instabilities and turbulent transport in tokamaks and mirrors, but they have been prohibitively expensive to integrate directly over the very long time scales required to compute kinetic plasma equilibrium. We demonstrate that these studies are now feasible thanks to novel multiscale methods delivering a 30,000X speed-up. The resulting kinetic equilibrium, electrostatic potential, and ion confinement time are consistent with analytic theory. This transformative capability opens the door to a new way of obtaining equilibria for mirrors, and we discuss how this technique may also accelerate calculations for tokamaks and stellarators. The models presented in this article address critical multiscale problems in modeling magnetic mirrors, opening a new research avenue for equilibrium studies using an explicit continuum gyrokinetic code.