What is it about?
This publication aims to study energy transport in tokamak plasmas through both measurements of turbulent temperature and density fluctuations in both hydrogen and deuterium plasmas and compare these with TGLF and GENE gyrokinetic models. Which plasmas are hotter and can the models reproduce reality with good fidelity?
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Why is it important?
This is important because we are not yet sure why tokamaks seem to keep heavier isotopes of hydrogen hotter than the lighter isotopes. Future reactors will use a mixture of deuterium (1 proton+ 1 neutron) and tritium (1 proton + 2 neutrons) fuel, so understanding the physics of energy confinement in tokamaks with varying isotope mass is paramount for the future of the field.
Perspectives
This paper is one of the most complete and rigurous validation efforts to date: it compares experiment with two gyrokinetic models including errors in both experiments and modeling. While agreement is not perfect, gyrokinetic modeling has come a long way to be able to predict fundamental turbulence quantities such as fluctuation level, correlation lengths, and density-temperature cross-phase. Much work is left to improve synthetic diagnostics as well as adding further observables to future rigurous quantitative validation efforts.
Pedro Molina Cabrera
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Isotope effects on energy transport in the core of ASDEX-Upgrade tokamak plasmas: Turbulence measurements and model validation, Physics of Plasmas, August 2023, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/5.0143416.
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