Intrinsic Toroidal Rotation Driven by Turbulent and Neoclassical Processes in Tokamak Plasmas from Global Gyrokinetic Simulations.

Gyrokinetic tokamak plasmas can exhibit intrinsic toroidal rotation driven by the residual stress. While most studies have attributed the residual stress to the parallel-momentum flux from the turbulent E×B motion, the parallel-momentum flux from the drift-orbit motion (denoted Π_{∥}^{D}) and the E×B-momentum flux from the E×B motion (denoted Π_{E×B}) are often neglected. Here, we use the global total-f gyrokinetic code XGC to study the residual stress in the core and the edge of a DIII-D H-mode plasma.

X-Point-Position-Dependent Intrinsic Toroidal Rotation in the Edge of the TCV Tokamak.

Edge intrinsic rotation was investigated in Ohmic L-mode discharges on the Tokamak à Configuration Variable, scanning the major radial position of the X point, R(X). Edge rotation decreased linearly with increasing R(X), vanishing or becoming countercurrent for an outboard X point, in agreement with theoretical expectations. The core rotation profile shifted fairly rigidly with the edge rotation, changing the central rotation speed by more than a factor of two.

Transport-driven toroidal rotation in the tokamak edge.

The interaction of passing-ion drift orbits with spatially inhomogeneous but purely diffusive radial transport is demonstrated to cause spontaneous toroidal spin-up in a simple model of the tokamak edge. Physically, major-radial orbit shifts cause orbit-averaged diffusivities to depend on v(∥), including its sign, leading to residual stress. The resulting pedestal-top intrinsic rotation scales with T(i)/B(θ), resembling typical experimental scalings.