Gyrokinetic prediction of microtearing turbulence in standard tokamaks

摘要

First global gyrokinetic simulations of microtearing instabilities in ASDEX Upgrade geometry provide increasing evidence for the existence of these modes in standard tokamaks. It is found that even in only moderately large devices, nonlocal effects like profile shearing are negligible, supporting the use of an efficient flux-tube approach. Nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations show that the resulting level of magnetic electron heat flux can be experimentally relevant.