Perpendicular magnetofluid theory for magnetically confined plasmas in the collisionless limit

摘要

Note that the magnetically confined plasmas in thermonuclear fusion turn to be collisionless. Some particles are trapped by the inhomogeneous equilibrium field or by the waves, while some others keep circulating. One cannot expect the charged particles to be collectively localized in space by collisions along the magnetic field lines. Consequently, the fluid parameters relating to the parallel motion, such as parallel fluid velocity, become inadequate. In this paper, the perpendicular magnetofluid theory for magnetically confined plasmas in the collisionless limit is developed. It revises Braginskii's transport theory by releasing the collisional dominance assumption. In the perpendicular direction, the particle spatial localization is solo resulted from the strong magnetic field, while the finite Larmor radius (FLR) effects are taken into account in the next order. In the parallel direction, the particle mobility feature is fully retained by constructing only the perpendicular moments. Therefore, besides the FLR effects till order O(k(perpendicular to)2 rho(2)(i))), the Landau damping, the trapped particle effects, and other parallel kinetic effects are all kept in the current formalism. Here, k(perpendicular to) is the perpendicular wave number and rho(i) is the ion Larmor radius. The theory can be used for both the analytical and numerical studies of magnetically confined plasmas. Published under license by AIP Publishing.