Turbulent transport and heating of trace heavy ions in hot, magnetized plasmas

Abstract

Scaling laws for the transport and heating of trace heavy ions in low-frequency, magnetized plasma turbulence are derived and compared with direct numerical simulations. The predicted dependences of turbulent fluxes and heating on ion charge and mass number are found to agree with numerical results for both stationary and differentially rotating plasmas. Heavy ion momentum transport is found to increase with mass, and heavy ions are found to be preferentially heated, implying a mass-dependent ion temperature for very weakly collisional plasmas and for partially-ionized heavy ions in strongly rotating plasmas.

4 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Physical Review Letters

References in corpus (2)

• Linearized model Fokker-Planck collision operators for gyrokinetic simulations. I. Theory
• Gyrokinetic turbulence: a nonlinear route to dissipation through phase space

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