Dynamics of particle flux in a cylindrical magnetized plasma

Abstract

Fluctuation-induced cross-field convective particle flux is studied in the cylindrical magnetized plasma assembly for non-linear turbulence analysis (PANTA). The plasma presents a wave turbulence characterized by a limited number of developing modes. To study the link between mode dynamics and particle transport, frequency-dependent time evolution of transport is obtained by applying complex continuous wavelet decomposition on spatio-temporal data from electrostatic probes. The method is shown to recover transport description consistent with other analysis methods for a weakly turbulent state. For a plasma state featuring a large non-sinusoidal structure, the time evolution of transport on the second harmonic of the main fluctuation shows a slow modulation of azimuthal mode number m = 0 with similarities to a zonal perturbation.