Nature of Transport across Sheared Zonal Flows in Electrostatic Ion-Temperature-Gradient Gyrokinetic Plasma Turbulence

Abstract

It is shown that the usual picture for the suppression of turbulent transport across a stable sheared flow based on a reduction of diffusive transport coefficients is, by itself, incomplete. By means of toroidal gyrokinetic simulations of electrostatic, collisionless ion-temperature-gradient turbulence, it is found that the nature of the transport is altered fundamentally, changing from diffusive to anticorrelated and subdiffusive. Additionally, whenever the flows are self-consistently driven by turbulence, the transport gains an additional non-Gaussian character. These results suggest that a description of transport across sheared flows using effective diffusivities is oversimplified.