Coulomb collisional effects on high energy particles in the presence of driftwave turbulence

Abstract

High energy particles' behavior including fusion born alpha particles in an ITER like tokamak in the presence of background driftwave turbulence is investigated by an orbit following calculation. The background turbulence is given by the toroidal driftwave eigenmode combined with a random number generator. The transport level is reduced as the particle energy increase; the widths of the guiding center islands produced by the passing particles are inverse proportional to the square root of parallel velocities. On the other hand, the trapped particles are sensitive to $E \times B$ drift at the banana tips whose radial displacement is larger for lower energy particles. Coulomb collisional effects are incorporated which modifies the transport process of the trapped high energy particles whose radial excursion resides in limited radial domains without collisions.