Particle-in-Cell Simulation Of Radio Frequency Waves In Tokamak Plasma

Current drive(CD)and auxiliary heating are critical for steady state operation of torodial magnetic confined fusion.Radio frequency(RF)waves,including lower hy-brid wave,ion Bernstein wave,fast wave and ion cyclotron wave et.al.,are considered as the most promising candidates for current drive and heating because of its high effi-ciency.They are inevitable component for future experimental and commercial fusion reactor.The RF waves is successfully applied on various current and past devices with relatively low density.However,with the density increasing towards commercial appli-cation regime,the efficiency of RF,especially lower hybrid current drive,is drastically weakened.Several theoretical works conjecture that the non-linear process may at-tribute to the failure of heating and current drive.Current computer simulation methods of RF wave mainly focus on linear and quasi-linear description of plasmas,the non-linear capability of these codes are very limited.In order to investigate the non-linear physics,based on plasma simulation platform VirtEx,a fully-kinetic ion/gyro-kinetic electron module is developed with electromagnetic capability.The formulation is de-scribed and coded in general curvilinear coordinate,which is suitable for the simulation of toroidally confined plasmas.In order to ensure the fidelity,the module is tested in units including particle motion test and field solver test.As a priliminary application of this module,the lower hybrid wave and ion Bernstein wave are simulated,the results match linear theory well.This module could be used as a powerful tool for shedding lights on non-linear interactions between RF waves and plasmas,and provides support for heating and current drive experiment.