Study of a drift wave-zonal mode system based on global electromagnetic Landau-fluid ITG simulation in toroidal plasmas

Abstract

Using a global Landau-fluid code in toroidal geometry, an electromagnetic ion temperature gradient (ITG) driven turbulence–zonal mode system is investigated. Two different types of zonal flows, i.e. stationary zonal flows in a low q (safety factor) region and oscillatory ones in a high q region, which are called geodesic acoustic modes, are found to be simultaneously excited in a torus. The stationary flows efficiently suppress turbulent transport, while the oscillatory ones weakly affect the turbulence due to their time varying nature. Therefore, in the low q region where the zonal flows are almost stationary, they are dominant over the turbulence. On the other hand, the turbulence is still active in the high q region where the zonal flows are oscillatory.