Plasma density turbulence obtained from a Hasegawa-Wakatani drift-wave turbulence model within the BOUT++ framework

<p>A Hasegawa-Wakatani drift-wave turbulence model [1] within the BOUT++ framework [2] was used to generate a set of turbulent plasma density profiles. Drift-wave turbulence is thought to be the dominant mechanism responsible for the anomalous transport observed in the edge of tokamak plasmas.</p> <p>The motivation to generate this rather large set of density profiles was to properly study the influence of plasma density fluctuations on traversing microwaves which requires ensemble-averaging to get statistically relevant results.</p> <p>The density data is given in normalized units (1.0 would correspond to 100 % fluctuation degree) on a mean-free background and the spatial coordinates are given in units of the ion Larmor radius.</p> <p>The form of equations used was the un-modified Hasegawa-Wakatani model [3]. Input parameters were kappa = 1.0 (normalised background density gradient), alpha = 0.5 (adiabaticity parameter), and diffusion constant D=1e-2.</p> <ol> <li>Wakatani, M., Hasegawa, A. (1984). <em>A collisional drift wave description of plasma edge turbulence.</em> Phys. Fluids <strong>27</strong>(3), 611. doi:10.1063/1.864660</li> <li>Dudson, B. <em>et al.</em> (2009). <em>BOUT++: A framework for parallel plasma fluid simulations</em>. Comp. Phys. Comm. <strong>180</strong>(9), 1467. doi:10.1016/j.cpc.2009.03.008</li> <li>Numata, R., Ball, R., &amp; Dewar, R. L. (2007). <em>Bifurcation in electrostatic resistive drift wave turbulence</em>. Phys. Plasmas <strong>14</strong>(10), 102312. doi:10.1063/1.2796106</li> </ol>