2009/02/21 by Zehua Guo, Guo, Zehua, Liu Chen +4
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Fluid Dynamics and Turbulent Flows #Magnetic confinement fusion research #Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations #Plasma Physics (physics.plasm-ph) #physics.plasm-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0902.3752
4pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2009/02/21 · openalex publication_date 2009/02/21 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The self-consistent spatiotemporal evolution of drift wave (DW) radial envelope and zonal flow (ZF) amplitude is investigated in a slab model [1]. Stationary solution of the coupled partial differential equations in a simple limit yields formation of DW-ZF soliton structures, which propagate at group velocity depending on the envelope peak amplitude. Additional interesting physics, e.g. generation, destruction, collision and reflection of solitons, as well as turbulence bursting can also be observed due to effects of linear growth/damping, dissipation, equilibrium nonuniformities and soliton dynamics. The propagation of soliton causes significant radial spreading of DW turbulence and therefore can affect transport scaling with system size by broadening of the turbulent region. Correspondence of the present analysis with the description of DW-ZF interactions in toroidal geometry [2, 3] is also elucidated.