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Updated: Jul 2, 2026

Magnetically Induced Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability
Published on: March 3, 2017
Cross-field transport by instabilities and blobs in a magnetized toroidal plasma
1Centre de Recherches en Physique des Plasmas-Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Association EURATOM-Confédération Suisse, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. mpodesta@pppl.gov
Abstract:
The mechanisms for anomalous transport across the magnetic field are investigated in a toroidal magnetized plasma. The role of plasma instabilities and macroscopic density structures (blobs) is discussed. Examples from a scenario with open magnetic field lines are shown. A transition from a main plasma region into a loss region is reproduced. In the main plasma, which includes particle and heat source locations, the transport is dominated by the fluctuation-induced particle and heat flux associated with a plasma instability. On the low-field side, the cross-field transport is ascribed to the intermittent ejection of macroscopic blobs propagating toward the outer wall. It is shown that instabilities and blobs represent fundamentally different mechanisms for cross-field transport.
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