A statistical analysis of avalanching heat transport in stationary enhanced core confinement regimes

We present a statistical analysis of heat transport in stationary enhanced confinement regimes obtained from flux-driven gyrofluid simulations. The probability density functions of heat flux in improved confinement regimes, characterized by the Nusselt number, show significant deviation from Gaussian, with a markedly fat tail, implying the existence of heat avalanches. Two types of avalanching transport are found to be relevant to stationary states, depending on the degree of turbulence suppression. In the weakly suppressed regime, heat avalanches occur in the form of quasiperiodic (QP) heat pulses. Collisional relaxation of zonal flow is likely to be the origin of these QP heat pulses. This phenomenon is similar to transient limit cycle oscillations observed prior to edge pedestal formation in recent experiments. On the other hand, a spectral analysis of heat flux in the strongly suppressed regime shows the emergence of a 1/f (f is the frequency) band, suggesting the presence of self-organized criticality (SOC)-like episodic heat avalanches. This episodic 1/f heat avalanches have a long temporal correlation and constitute the dominant transport process in this regime. VC 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4752218]