Comparison of bifurcation dynamics of turbulent transport models for the L-H transition

Abstract

In more than three decades, a large amount of models and mechanisms have been proposed to describe a very beneficial feature of magnetically confined fusion plasmas: the L-H transition. Bifurcation theory can be used to compare these different models based on their dynamical transition structure. In this paper, we employ bifurcation theory to distinguish two fundamentally different descriptions of the interaction between turbulence levels and sheared flows. The analytic bifurcation analysis characterises the parameter space structure of the transition dynamics. Herewith, in these models three dynamically different types of transitions are characterised, sharp transitions, oscillatory transitions, and smooth transitions. One of the two models has a very robust transition structure and is therefore likely to be more accurate for such a robust phenomenon as the L-H transition. The other model needs more fine-tuning to get non-oscillatory transitions. These conclusions from the analytic bifurcation analysis are confirmed by dedicated numerical simulations, with the newly developed code Bifurcator. [http://dx

Reversed rotation of limit cycle oscillation and dynamics of low-intermediate-high confinement transition

“…[6] In order to study the nonlinear mechanism associated with the LH transition, lots of theoretical and experimental efforts have been made, which revealed that the zonal flows play a key role in the drift wave turbulence, [6,7] mean 𝐸 × 𝐵 flow will suppress the turbulence, [8,9] and different types of transitions (such as oscillating, sharp and smooth ones) are also discovered. [10,11] The active studies in this field are aimed at an understanding of nonlinear physics processes in coherent structure formation and anomalous transport in plasmas. [12] The importance of zonal flows in the LH transition was experimentally demonstrated through bicoherence analysis on DIII-D experimental data.…”