Effects of electrostatic trapping on neoclassical transport in an impure plasma

Abstract

Contamination of a toroidally confined plasma by highly charged impurity ions can produce substantial variation of the electrostatic potential within a magnetic surface. The resulting electrostatic trapping and electrostatic drifts, of hydrogen ions and electrons, yields significant alterations in neoclassical transport theory. A transport theory which includes these effects is derived from the drift-kinetic equation, with an ordering scheme modeled on the parameters of recent tokamak experiments. The theory self-consistently predicts that electrostatic trapping should be fully comparable to magnetic trapping, and provides transport coefficients which, depending quadratically upon the temperature and pressure gradients, differ markedly from the standard neoclassical coefficients for a pure plasma.