Bohm-like Neoclassical Transport in Highly Collisional Toroidal Plasmas with High Density Gradients

Abstract

Conventional neoclassical theory in the Pfirsch-Schl\"{u}ter regime fails to accurately model collision-induced transport in toroidal plasmas with high density gradients. In this scenario, we find that collision suppresses the return flow, leading to the dominance of the transport flux by the vacuum toroidal field drift with a reduced Bohm-like scaling. The new regime is also confirmed by full-orbit particle simulations, and can be employed to improve the accurate modeling of impurity transport in toroidal magnetized plasmas.