Energetic bounds on gyrokinetic instabilities. Part I: Fundamentals

Abstract

Upper bounds on the growth of free energy in gyrokinetics are derived. These bounds apply to all local gyrokinetic instabilities in the geometry of a flux tube, i.e. a slender volume of plasma aligned with the magnetic field, regardless of the geometry of field, the number of particle species, or collisions. The results apply both to linear instabilities and to the nonlinear growth of finite-amplitude fluctuations.

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• Astrophysical gyrokinetics: kinetic and fluid turbulent cascades in magnetized weakly collisional plasmas
• Nonlinear phase mixing and phase-space cascade of entropy in gyrokinetic plasma turbulence
• Turbulent transport in tokamak plasmas with rotational shear
• Up-down symmetry of the turbulent transport of toroidal angular momentum in tokamaks
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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Energetic bounds on gyrokinetic instabilities. Part II. Modes of optimal growth
• Energetic bounds on gyrokinetic instabilities. Part III. Generalized free energy
• Suppression of temperature-gradient-driven turbulence by sheared flows in fusion plasmas
• The gyrokinetic field invariant and electromagnetic temperature-gradient instabilities in `good-curvature' plasmas