Transport processes in phase space driven by trapped particle turbulence in tokamak plasmas

One of the most promising approach to controlled nuclear fusion is the tokamak. It is a toroidal machine confining a fusion plasma using magnetic fields. Transport of particles and heat, from the core toward the edges happens spontaneously, degrades the efficiency of the tokamak, and is driven by turbulence. We use a bounce-averaged 4D gyrokinetic code which solves the Vlasov-Quasi-neutrality system. The code is based on a reduced model which averages out the cyclotron and the bounce motion of the trapped particles to reduce the dimensionality. In this work we developed and tested a new module for the code, allowing to track test particle trajectories in phase space. As a first result obtained with test particles, we achieved to separate the diffusive contribution to the radial particle flux in energy space, from the non-diffusive contributions. Both fluxes present an intense peak indicating resonant particles dominate transport. On short period of time the test particles undergo a small scale advection, but on longer times, they follow a random walk process. We then explored with greater accuracy the fluxes in energy space. Furthermore we compared the obtained fluxes with quasi-linear predictions and found a qualitative agreement, although there was a ~50% discrepancy in the peak magnitude.