Effects of toroidal field ripple on suprathermal ions in tokamak plasmas

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Abstract
Analytic calculations of three important effects of toroidal field ripple on suprathermal ions in tokamak plasmas are presented. In the first process, collisional ripple-trapping, ions become trapped in local magnetic wells near their banana tips owing to pitch-angle scattering as they traverse the ripple on barely unripple-trapped orbits. In the second process, collisionless ripple-trapping, ions are captured (again near a banana tip) owing to their finite orbits, which carry them out into regions of higher ripple. In the third process, banana-drift diffusion, fast-ion banana orbits fail to close precisely, due to a ripple-induced ‘variable lingering period’ near the banana tips. These three mechanisms lead to substantial radial transport of banana-trapped, neutral-beam-injected ions when the quantity α*≡ε|τ|/Nqδ is of order unity or smaller.