UW-CPTC 06-3 Key hypothesis of paleoclassical model

The paleoclassical model of radial electron heat transport in resistive, current-carrying toroidal plasmas is based on a key hypothesis — that electron guiding centers move and diffuse with radially localized annuli of poloidal magnetic flux. This hypothesis is shown to result from the temporal evolution of the guiding center version of the canonical toroidal angular momentum on the magnetic field diffusion time scale τη ≡ a/6Dη. These guiding center motion and diffusion effects modify the usual drift-kinetic equation by adding a τη time-scale Fokker-Planck spatial diffusion operator.