Ion and Electron Dynamics in Nonlinear PIC Simulations

ITG and ETG turbulence is investigated with the nonlinear global PIC code ORB5. The large variety of numerical schemes and simulations domains used has sometimes lead to important discrepancies in the transport predictions. In order to discuss these disagreements, emphasis must be put on ways to check the numerical accuracy, such as energy conservation and numerical noise measurement. This paper therefore presents benchmarks, new algorithms and a noise diagnostic. After having demonstrated the numerical quality of our simulations, 2 topics are visited: the unclear role of the parallel nonlinearity and the transport level in ETG turbulence, for which predictions differing by one order of magnitude had been made elsewhere.