Research Report NIFS Series: NIFS-957

Abstract

In recent tokamak experiments it has been found that so-called diffusion theory based on the "diffusion of magnetic field lines" overestimates the radial energy transport in the ergodic region of the collisionless plasma affected by resonant magnetic perturbations (RMPs), though the RMPs induce chaotic behavior of the magnetic field lines. The result implies that the modelling of the transport should be reconsidered for low collisionality cases. A computer simulation study of transport in the ergodic region is required for understanding fundamental properties of collisionless ergodized-plasmas, estimating the transport coefficients, and reconstructing the modelling of the transport. In this paper, we report the simulation study of thermal transport in the ergodic region under the assumption of neglecting effects of an electric field, impurities and neutrals. Because of the simulations neglecting interactions with different particle-species and saving the computational tirne, we treat ions (protons) in our numerical-study of the transport. We find that the thermal diffusivity in the ergodic region is extremely small compared to the one predicted by the theory of field-line diffusion and that the diffusivity depends on both the collision frequency and the strength of RMPs even for the collisionless ergodized-plasma.