On the validity of the local diffusive paradigm in turbulent plasma transport.
A systematic, constructive and self-consistent procedure to quantify nonlocal, nondiffusive action at a distance in plasma turbulence is exposed and applied to turbulent heat fluxes computed from the state-of-the-art full- f, flux-driven gyrokinetic GYSELA and XGC1 codes. A striking commonality is found: heat transport below a dynamically selected mesoscale has the structure of a Lévy distribution, is strongly nonlocal, nondiffusive, scale-free, and avalanche mediated; at larger scales, we report the observation of a self-organized flow structure which we call the " E × B staircase" after its planetary analog.
Dif-Pradalier
G
G
Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, UCSD, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA. gdifpradalier@ucsd.edu
Diamond
P H
PH
Grandgirard
V
V
Sarazin
Y
Y
Abiteboul
J
J
Garbet
X
X
Ghendrih
Ph
P
Strugarek
A
A
Ku
S
S
Chang
C S
CS