Studies of Turbulence in Magnetized Plasmas Based on Gyrokinetic Theory : From Fusion to Space

Abstract

Physical properties of fusion and space plasmas are significantly influenced by background magnetic fields. The gyrokinetic theory is a basic framework for describing microinstabilities and turbulence in these magnetized plasmas. In the gyrokinetic theory, particles' distribution functions are averaged with respect to the angle variables associated with particles' gyromotion around magnetic field lines and the dimension of the treated phase space is reduced so that theoretical analyses and numerical simulations can be simplified. Besides primary kinetic effects such as particles' orbits in complex magnetic configurations, finite gyroradii, and Landau damping due to resonant wave-particle interaction are accurately described by the gyrokinetic model. Therefore, theoretical and simulation researches based on the gyro-kinetics have been actively done in the fields of turbulent transport in fusion plasmas and spectral analyses of space plasma turbulence.