Impurity transport due to electromagnetic drift wave turbulence

Journal article, 2012

Finite β effects on impurity transport are studied through local linear gyrokinetic simulations with GYRO [J. Candy and E. Belli, General Atomics Report No. GA-A26818, 2011]; in particular, we investigate the parametric dependences of the impurity peaking factor (zero-flux density gradient) and the onset of the kinetic ballooning modes (KBMs). We find that electromagnetic effects even at low β can have significant impact on the impurity transport. The KBM instability threshold depends on the plasma parameters, particularly strongly on plasma shape. We have shown that magnetic geometry significantly influences the results, and the commonly used s-α model overestimates the KBM growth rates and ITG stabilization at high β. In the β range, where the KBM is the dominant instability the impurity peaking factor is strongly reduced, with very little dependence on β and the impurity charge.