Greifswald 2009 – scientific programme

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P: Fachverband Plasmaphysik

P 20: Hauptvorträge Lauber, Krämer-Flecken

P 20.1: Invited Talk

Thursday, April 2, 2009, 11:10–11:40, HS Biochemie (groß)

Fast-particle-driven modes in fusion plasmas — •Philipp Lauber, Sibylle Guenter, Michael Bruedgam, Manuel Garcia-Munoz, Valentin Igochine, and Mark Maraschek — Max-Planck-Institut fuer Plasmaphysik, Boltzmannstr 2, 85748 Garching

On the way to a comprehensive understanding of the properties of a burning plasma the physics of super-thermal particles due to external heating and fusion reactions plays a key role. Therefore, dedicated experimental investigations in this field on present day tokamaks and their theoretical understanding and modelling are an important step not only for ITER but also for a future reactor device.

Especially Alfvén and Alfvén-acoustic type instabilities are predicted to strongly interact with the fast particle population and to contribute critically to the radial redistribution of the energetic ions. Consequently, the drive, the damping and the saturation mechanisms of these modes need to be studied carefully.

In order to investigate the properties of these modes and carry out detailed comparisons to experimental measurements at ASDEX-Upgrade and other tokamaks, a linear gyrokinetic eigenvalue code is employed. In addition to a non-perturbative treatment of the fast particles it includes full background kinetic effects and therefore allows to calculate both growth and damping rates of kinetically modified low-n MHD modes. Moreover, also mid-n kinetic modes in the coupling regime of shear Alfvén, ion acoustic and drift waves can be examined. For the non-linear evolution, a drift-kinetic hybrid code is used.