Ryusuke Numata

In this work, the development of two-dimensional current sheets with respect to tearing modes, in collisionless plasmas with a strong guide field, is analysed. During their nonlinear evolution, these thin current sheets can become unstable to the formation of plasmoids, which allows the magnetic reconnection process to reach high reconnection rates. We carry out a detailed study of the effect of a finite, which also implies finite electron Larmor radius effects, on the collisionless plasmoid instability. This study is conducted through a comparison of gyrofluid and gyrokinetic simulations. The comparison shows in general a good capability of the gyrofluid models in predicting the plasmoid instability observed with gyrokinetic simulations. We show that the effects of promotes the plasmoid growth. The effect of the closure applied during the derivation of the gyrofluid model is also studied through the comparison among the variations of the different contributions to the total energy.

Abstract The destabilization mechanism of the collisional microtearing mode driven by an electron temperature gradient is studied using theoretical analyses and gyrokinetic simulations including a comprehensive collision model, in magnetized slab plasmas. The essential destabilization mechanism of the microtearing mode is the lag of the parallel inductive electric field behind the magnetic field owing to the time-dependent thermal force and inertia force induced by the velocity-dependent electron--ion collisions. Quantitative measurements of the collision effects enable us to identify the unstable regime against collisionality and reveal the relevance of the collisional microtearing mode with existing toroidal experiments. A nonlinear simulation demonstrates that the microtearing mode does not drive magnetic reconnection with the explosive release and conversion of the magnetic energy.

Noncollisional current sheets that form during the nonlinear development of spontaneous magnetic reconnection are characterized by a small thickness, of the order of the electron skin depth. They can become unstable to the formation of plasmoids, which allows the magnetic reconnection process to reach high reconnection rates. In this work, we investigate the marginal stability conditions for the development of plasmoids when the forming current sheet is purely collisionless and in the presence of a strong guide field. We analyze the geometry that characterizes the reconnecting current sheet, and what promotes its elongation. Once the reconnecting current sheet is formed, we identify the regimes for which it is plasmoid unstable. Our study shows that plasmoids can be obtained, in this context, from current sheets with an aspect ratio much smaller than in the collisional regime, and that the plasma flow channel of the marginally stable current layers maintains an inverse aspect ratio of 0.1.

A method of random forcing with a constant power input for two-dimensional gyrokinetic turbulence simulations is developed for the study of stationary plasma turbulence. The property that the forcing term injects the energy at a constant rate enables turbulence to be set up in the desired range and energy dissipation channels to be assessed quantitatively in a statistically steady state. Using the developed method, turbulence is demonstrated in the large-scale fluid and small-scale kinetic regimes, where the theoretically predicted scaling laws are reproduced successfully.

The problem of the linear microtearing mode in a slab magnetised plasma, and its connection to kinetic reconnecting modes, is addressed. Electrons are described using a novel hybrid fluid-kinetic model that captures electron heating, ions are gyrokinetic. Magnetic reconnection can occur as a result of either electron conductivity and inertia, depending on which one predominates. We eschew the use of an energy dependent collision frequency in the collisional operator model, unlike previous works. A model of the electron conductivity that matches the weakly collisional regime to the exact Landau result at zero collisionality and gives the correct electron isothermal response far from the reconnection region is presented. We identify in the breaking of the constant-A(parallel to) approximation the necessary condition for microtearing instability in the collisional regime. Connections with the theory of collisional non-isothermal (or semicollisional) and collisionless tearing-parity electron temperature gradient driven (ETG) modes are elucidated.

Magnetic reconnection and associated heating of ions and electrons in strongly magnetized, weakly collisional plasmas are studied by means of gyrokinetic simulations. It is shown that an appreciable amount of the released magnetic energy is dissipated to yield (irreversible) electron and ion heating via phase mixing. Electron heating is mostly localized to the magnetic island, not the current sheet, and occurs after the dynamical reconnection stage. Ion heating is comparable to electron heating only in high-beta plasmas, and results from both parallel and perpendicular phase mixing due to finite Larmor radius (FLR) effects; in space, ion heating is mostly localized to the interior of a secondary island (plasmoid) that arises from the instability of the current sheet.

We present nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations of collisionless magnetic reconnection with non-uniformities in the plasma density, the electron temperature, and the ion temperature. The density gradient can stabilize reconnection due to diamagnetic effects but destabilize driftwave modes that produce turbulence. The electron temperature gradient triggers microtearing modes that drive rapid small-scale reconnection and strong electron heat transport. The ion temperature gradient destabilizes ion temperature gradient modes that, like the driftwaves, may enhance reconnection in some cases. (C) 2014 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Microscopic particle effects (kinetic effects) play important roles in high-temperature, low-density, weakly collisional plasmas although macroscopically plasmas are considered as fluids. Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental process of plasmas where kinetic effects are crucial. Kinetic simulations of the magnetic reconnection process by taking particle-particle collisions into account have performed, and influence of the kinetic effects on thermodynamic properties of plasmas is discussed.

In magnetized plasmas, a turbulent cascade occurs in phase space at scales smaller than the thermal Larmor radius ("sub-Larmor scales") [Tatsuno et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 015003 (2009)]. When the turbulence is restricted to two spatial dimensions perpendicular to the background magnetic field, two independent cascades may take place simultaneously because of the presence of two collisionless invariants. In the present work, freely decaying turbulence of two-dimensional electrostatic gyrokinetics is investigated by means of phenomenological theory and direct numerical simulations. A dual cascade (forward and inverse cascades) is observed in velocity space as well as in position space, which we diagnose by means of nonlinear transfer functions for the collisionless invariants. We find that the turbulence tends to a time-asymptotic state, dominated by a single scale that grows in time. A theory of this asymptotic state is derived in the form of decay laws. Each case that we study falls into one of three regimes (weakly collisional, marginal, and strongly collisional), determined by a dimensionless number D*, a quantity analogous to the Reynolds number. The marginal state is marked by a critical number D* = D-0 that is preserved in time. Turbulence initialized above this value become increasingly inertial in time, evolving toward larger and larger D*; turbulence initialized below D0 become more and more collisional, decaying to progressively smaller D*. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4769029]

Linear gyrokinetic simulations covering the collisional-collisionless transitional regime of the tearing instability are performed. It is shown that the growth rate scaling with collisionality agrees well with that predicted by a two-fluid theory for a low plasma beta case in which ion kinetic dynamics are negligible. Electron wave-particle interactions (Landau damping), finite Larmor radius, and other kinetic effects invalidate the fluid theory in the collisionless regime, in which a general non-polytropic equation of state for pressure (temperature) perturbations should be considered. We also vary the ratio of the background ion to electron temperatures and show that the scalings expected from existing calculations can be recovered, but only in the limit of very low beta. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3659035]

A three-dimensional, nonlinear gyrokinetic simulation of plasma turbulence resolving scales from the ion to electron gyroradius with a realistic mass ratio is presented, where all damping is provided by resolved physical mechanisms. The resulting energy spectra are quantitatively consistent with a magnetic power spectrum scaling of k(-2.8) as observed in in situ spacecraft measurements of the "dissipation range" of solar wind turbulence. Despite the strongly nonlinear nature of the turbulence, the linear kinetic Alfven wave mode quantitatively describes the polarization of the turbulent fluctuations. The collisional ion heating is measured at subion-Larmor radius scales, which provides evidence of the ion entropy cascade in an electromagnetic turbulence simulation.

The gyrokinetic simulation code AstroGK is developed to study fundamental aspects of kinetic plasmas and for applications mainly to astrophysical problems. AstroGK is an Eulerian slab code that solves the electromagnetic gyrokinetic-Maxwell equations in five-dimensional phase space, and is derived from the existing gyrokinetics code GS2 by removing magnetic geometry effects. Algorithms used in the code are described. The code is benchmarked using linear and nonlinear problems. Serial and parallel performance scalings are also presented. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Collisions between counterpropagating Alfveacuten waves represent the fundamental building block of plasma turbulence, a phenomenon of great importance to a wide variety of fields, from space physics and astrophysics to controlled magnetic fusion. Proposed experiments to study Alfveacuten wave collisions on the Large Plasma Device (LAPD) [W. Gekelman, H. Pfister, Z. Lucky, J. Bamber, D. Leneman, and J. Maggs, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 62, 2875 (1991)] at the University of California, Los Angeles, will benefit significantly from numerical modeling capable of reproducing not only the linear dispersive effects of kinetic and inertial Alfveacuten waves, but also the nonlinear evolution of the Alfveacutenic turbulence. This paper presents a comparison of linear simulation results using the astrophysical gyrokinetics code, AstroGK, to the measured linear properties of kinetic and inertial Alfveacuten waves in the LAPD plasma. Results demonstrate that: (1) finite frequency effects due to the ion cyclotron resonance do not prevent satisfactory modeling of the LAPD plasma using gyrokinetic theory; and (2) an advanced collision operator, recently implemented in AstroGK, enables the code to successfully reproduce the collisionally enhanced damping rates of linear waves measured in recent LAPD experiments. These tests justify the use of AstroGK in the modeling of LAPD Alfveacuten wave experiments and suggest that AstroGK will be a valuable tool in modeling the nonlinear evolution of proposed Alfveacuten wave collision experiments.

The Hasegawa-Wakatani system of equations may be used to predict and study the behavior of plasma flow. Stability analysis of the flow requires results over prolonged time series, which places a great strain on computational resources. Results can only be achieved for a wide choice of parameters by using numerical methods that allow long time steps and do not pollute the results with numerical instabilities. The report presents an analysis of several linear multistep methods and concludes that much of the understanding of the stability of linear systems also applies to the study of nonlinear problems such as the Hasegawa-Wakatani system of equations. In particular, methods such as the backward differentiation formulas should be used with the stiff systems generated by the discrete formulation of the Hasegawa-Wakatani system of equations.

The Hasegawa-Wakatani equations, coupling plasma density, and electrostatic potential through an approximation to the physics of parallel electron motions, are a simple model that describes resistive drift wave turbulence. Numerical analyses of bifurcation phenomena in the model are presented, that provide new insights into the interactions between turbulence and zonal flows in the tokamak plasma edge region. The simulation results show a regime where, after an initial transient, drift wave turbulence is suppressed through zonal flow generation. As a parameter controlling the strength of the turbulence is tuned, this zonal-flow-dominated state is rapidly destroyed and a turbulence-dominated state re-emerges. The transition is explained in terms of the Kelvin-Helmholtz stability of zonal flows. This is the first observation of an upshift of turbulence onset in the resistive drift wave system, which is analogous to the well-known Dimits shift in turbulence driven by ion temperature gradients. (C) 2007 American Institute of Physiscs.

In a two-dimensional version of the modified Hasegawa-Wakatani (HW) model, which describes electrostatic resistive drift wave turbulence, the resistive coupling between vorticity and density does not act on the zonal components (k(y) = 0). It is therefore necessary to modify the HW model to treat the zonal components properly. The modified equations are solved numerically, and visualization and analysis of the solutions show generation of stable zonal flows, through conversion of turbulent kinetic energy, and the consequent turbulence and transport suppression. It is demonstrated by comparison that the modification is essential for generation of zonal flows.

We have developed a new shell model for the Hall magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) system to investigate the spectral properties of the plasma turbulence. Through the numerical simulation of the shell model, in the Hall MHD case, we find that the energy spectral index of the flow field indicates - 5/3 in the whole inertial range, while the energy spectral index of the magnetic field indicates -5/3 (-7/3) in the large- (small-)scale region of the inertial range. The simulation of the conventional MHD case was also carried out, and we find that the energy spectral index of both -5/3.

A three-dimensional Hall-Magnetohydrodynamics (Hall-MHD) simulation code has been developed to study the self-organization process in two-fluid plasmas. An appreciable amount of flow is created in the direction perpendicular to the magnetic field, which is in a sharp contrast with the relaxed states in single-fluid MHD. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Magnetic null points act as scattering centers where particles describe chaotic orbits and the mixing effect increases the kinetic entropy. In an open system where convection of particles into/from the chaos region exists, the saturation of the entropy can be avoided, and continuous dissipation is achieved. The chaos-induced collisionless resistivity of ions enables fast magnetic reconnection. By matching the microscopic (kineticprocess) and the macroscopic parameters of reconnection, we obtain a self-consistent model of the diffusion region.

Magnetic null points act as scattering centers where particles describe chaotic orbits and the mixing effect increases the kinetic entropy. In an open system where convection of particles into/from the chaos region exists, the saturation of the entropy can be avoided, and continuous dissipation is achieved. The chaos-induced collisionless resistivity of ions enables fast magnetic reconnection. By matching the microscopic (kinetic process) and the macroscopic parameters of reconnection, we obtain a self-consistent model of the diffusion region.

The new simulation method was developed based on the T-method to simulate the AC loss of high temperature superconducting magnetic flywheel when the magnetic rotor rotates with the inhomogeneous component of the magnetic field. The dependence of AC loss upon some conditions such as the wave number, the amplitude of inhomogeneous component were analyzed.