Impact of the background toroidal rotation on particle and heat turbulent transport in tokamak plasmas

Abstract

Recent developments in the gyrokinetic theory have shown that, in a toroidal device, the Coriolis drift associated with the background plasma rotation significantly affects the small scale instabilities [A. G. Peeters et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 265003 (2007)]. The later study, which focuses on the effect of the Coriolis drift on toroidal momentum transport is extended in the present paper to heat and particle transport. It is shown numerically using the gyrokinetic flux-tube code GKW [A. G. Peeters and D. Strintzi, Phys. Plasmas 11, 3748 (2004)], and supported analytically, that the Coriolis drift and the parallel dynamics play a similar role in the coupling of density, temperature, and velocity perturbations. The effect on particle and heat fluxes increases with the toroidal rotation (directly) and with the toroidal rotation gradient (through the parallel mode structure), depends on the direction of propagation of the perturbation, increases with the impurity charge number and with the impurity mass to charge number ratio. The case of very high toroidal rotation, relevant to spherical tokamaks, is investigated by including the effect of the centrifugal force in a fluid model. The main effect of the centrifugal force is to decrease the local density gradient at the low field side midplane and to add an extra contribution to the fluxes. The conditions for which the inertial terms significantly affect the heat and particle fluxes are evidenced.