This site is devoted to disseminating the activities in the simulation of plasma instabilities and turbulence carried out in the Laboratorio Nacional de Fusión with the particle-in-cell code EUTERPE.
The LNF collaborates with the Max Planck IPP at Greifswald for the development and exploitation of the code EUTERPE. Using this code, several topics have been investigated in the last years by means of numerical simulations.
The code was benchmarked against TORB code in a screw pinch geometry in both linear and nonlinear simulations [1]. In this geometry, the generation of a zonal flow (ZF) and the influence of beta and the magnetic shear on it was studied [2].
The linear relaxation of zonal flows in stellarators has been extensively studied by means of simulations with EUTERPE [3, 4, 5, 6]. The characteristic low-frequency ZF oscillation appearing in linear collisionless simulations was identified experimentally in the stellarator TJ-II by comparing the experimental measurements with the heavy ion beam probe (HIBP) with gyrokinetic simulations with EUTERPE [7, 8].
The code EUTERPE has also been used to study electrostatic instabilities in the stellarators TJ-II, LHD, and W7-X. The ITG instability showed not to be relevant in TJ-II while electron-driven instabilities are dominant. Trapped electron modes were identified as relevant instabilities in the ion scales in TJ-II [9, 10, 11].
The code EUTERPE has been benchmarked against ORB5 in tokamak geometry in both linear and nonlinear simulations [12].
The tools for the control of numerical noise were thoroughly studied and the first nonlinear simulations of ITG instabilities were carried out in W7-X configurations using experimental profiles.
The code has also been compared with Stella, GENE and GENE-3D and now it is being used for the simulation of W7-X plasmas.
under construction