One of the major challenges for economical operation of fusion reactors lies with insufficient plasma confinement due to turbulent transport. However, large-scale shear flows called zonal flows, driven by the instabilities themselves, are capable of reducing transport levels. In this work, numerical two-fluid calculations have been utilized to examine the interaction between zonal flows and turbulent drift wave modes. Besides two transport time scales, coinciding with a transition to the zonal flow regime which has been modeled theoretically, a bifurcation of the shear flow and transport has been discovered, capable of reducing particle losses via its associated flow asymmetries and density corrugations.
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One of the major challenges for economical operation of fusion reactors lies with insufficient plasma confinement due to turbulent transport. However, large-scale shear flows called zonal flows, driven by the instabilities themselves, are capable of reducing transport levels. In this work, numerical two-fluid calculations have been utilized to examine the interaction between zonal flows and turbulent drift wave modes. Besides two transport time scales, coinciding with a transition to the zonal f...
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