A mechanism of particle pinch for trace impurities in tokamak plasmas, arising from the effect of parallel velocity fluctuations in the presence of a turbulent electrostatic potential, is identified analytically by means of a reduced fluid model and verified numerically with a gyrokinetic code for the first time. The direction of such a pinch reverses as a function of the direction of rotation of the turbulence in agreement with the impurity pinch reversal observed in some experiments when moving from dominant auxiliary ion heating to dominant auxiliary electron heating.

The dependence of core plasma impurity transport on the Z number has been investigated for ASDEX Upgrade H mode discharges. For the elements Ne, Ar, Kr and Xe the diffusion coefficient in the centre is D ≤ 6 × 10 −2 m 2 /s and rises with the radial distance from the centre. With increasing Z number the transport becomes strongly convective with inward directed drift velocities that produce very peaked impurity densities for high Z. The inward drift decreases with decreasing deuterium density gradient. Neoclassical transport of the impurities has been calculated numerically. The calculated diffusion coefficient and drift velocity are close to the experimental values for the lower-Z elements Ne and Ar. However, for high Z, the calculated diffusion coefficient is smaller by a factor of up to 2.5 and the inward drift velocity is too small by a factor of 10. Toroidal rotation of the plasma that leads to an increased impurity density on the outboard side of the flux surfaces is not taken into account by the neoclassical calculations. Inboard/outboard asymmetries are not present for Ar and Ne with toroidal Mach number Mtor around 1. However, for heavier elements than Kr with Mtor ≈ 2 and an outboard/inboard ratio of ≈1.5, poloidal variation of the impurity density is important and might account for the discrepancy between the measured and calculated transport coefficients.

New experimental results obtained in ASDEX Upgrade [O. Gruber, H.-S. Bosch, S. Günter et al., Nucl. Fusion 39, 1321 (1999)] plasmas in low confinement mode with central electron cyclotron heating are presented in which transitions in both the particle and electron heat transport properties have been observed. A comprehensive albeit qualitative explanation for both the transport channels is provided in the framework of the theory of ion temperature gradient and trapped electron mode microinstabilities. The different transport behaviors are related to the dominant instability at play and to the collisionality regime. In particular, central electron heating induces a flattening of the density profile when the dominant instability is a trapped electron mode, and density peaking is observed to increase with decreasing collisionality.