The European turbulence code benchmarking effort: turbulence driven by thermal gradients in magnetically confined plasmas

Abstract

A cross-comparison and verification of state-of-the-art European codes describing gradient-driven plasma turbulence in the core and edge regions of tokamaks, carried out within the EFDA Task Force on Integrated Tokamak Modelling, is presented. In the case of core ion temperature gradient (ITG) driven turbulence with adiabatic electrons (neglecting trapped particles), good/reasonable agreement is found between various gyrokinetic/gyrofluid codes. The main physical reasons for some deviations observed in nonlocal simulations are discussed. The edge simulations agree very well on collisionality scaling and acceptably well on beta scaling (below the MHD boundary) for cold-ion cases, also in terms of the non-linear mode structure.