Flow Shear Suppression of Pedestal Turbulence--A First Principles Theoretical Framework

摘要

A combined analytic and computational gyrokinetic approach is developed toaddress the question of the scaling of pedestal turbulent transport witharbitrary levels of $E \times B$ shear. Due to strong gradients and shaping inthe pedestal, the instabilities of interest are not curvature-driven like thecore instabilities. By extensive numerical (gyrokinetic) simulations, it isdemonstrated that pedestal modes respond to shear suppression very much likethe predictions of a basic analytic decorrelation theory. The quantitativeagreement between the two provides us with a new dependable, first principles(physics based) theoretical framework to predict the efficacy of shearsuppression in burning plasmas that lie in a low-shear regime not accessed bypresent experiments.