Role of wave-particle resonance in turbulent transport in toroidal plasmas
Abstract The clear understanding of the wave-particle interaction and associated transport mechanism of different particle species in the drift wave instabilities is important for accurate modeling and predictions of the plasma confinement properties. Our global gyrokinetic simulations find that electron particle and heat transport decreases to a very low level, while ion heat transport level has no dramatic change when wave-particle resonance is suppressed in the collisionless trapped electron mode (CTEM) turbulence in the tokamak core. Similarly, ion heat transport in the self-consistent ion temperature gradient (ITG) turbulence simulation is qualitatively similar to that in the test-particle simulation using the static ITG turbulence fields. These simulation results show that electron transport is primarily driven by the wave-particle resonance in the CTEM turbulence, but the ion transport is mostly driven by the nonlinear wave-particle scattering in both the CTEM and ITG turbulence.