In recent years, a strong effort has been dedicated to the development of tokamak plasma regimes alternative to the standard high confinement mode (H-mode) with type-I edge localized mode (ELM), i.e. ELM-free and small-ELM regimes, given the associated hardly sustainable energy and particle fluxes on plasma facing components. In this work, we will focus on new H-mode regimes with small-ELMs, the so-called baseline small-ELMs (BSE), characterized by high thermal confinement and low core impurity accumulation, which have been recently found at JET. In order to characterize the micro-turbulence at play at the top of the pedestal, an extensive local linear gyrokinetic analysis with the GKW code has been carried out. In particular, a comparison between a reference type-I ELM (#97395) and two BSE plasmas (#96994 and #94442) has been performed. The ion-scale (0.1 <= k ? ? i <= 2) micro-turbulence is found to have different characteristics in the two regimes. Indeed, kinetic-ballooning modes (KBM) are destabilized in the type-I ELM regime at k ? ? i ~0.1, while they are stable in BSE regimes. In addition, negative (i.e. electron-diamagnetic-direction) frequency modes, identified as electron-temperature-gradient (ETG) modes, are destabilized at k ? ? i ~1.5 in the type-I ELM regime while BSE regimes are characterized by positive (i.e. ion-diamagnetic-direction) frequency modes. Meanwhile, at electron-scale (10 <= k ? ? i <= 700) ETG modes are the dominant micro-instabilities in both regimes. Then, since BSE regimes are characterized by a higher impurity concentration at the pedestal, particular attention has been given to the role played by them. We found that impurities represent a critical player in the linear dynamics, strongly affecting the nature of micro-instabilities at ion-scale.
Gyrokinetic Stability Analysis of JET Pedestal Top Plasmas with Small-ELMs
Dicorato M.; Muraglia M.; Camenen Y.; Garcia J.; Garbet X.; Frigione D.; Garzotti L.; Lomas P.; Rimini F.; Sozzi C.; Van Eester D.
ID | 476592 |
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DOI | 10.1088/1742-6596/2397/1/012007 |
PRODUCT TYPE | Conference Proceeding |
LAST UPDATE | 2023-01-17T15:27:55Z |
EU PROJECT | EUROfusion |
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TITLE | Implementation of activities described in the Roadmap to Fusion during Horizon 2020 through a Joint programme of the members of the EUROfusion consortium |
FOUNDING PROGRAM | H2020 |