Relationship between drift kinetics, gyrokinetics and magnetohydrodynamics in the long-wavelength limit

Abstract

Gyrokinetic theories, even ‘global’ models, typically rely on a separation in scale (in perpendicular wavelength) between the fluctuations and the system scale. In such models direct simulation of system-scale dynamics like magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) motion is formally not consistent. Drift-kinetic theory, on the other hand, may be directly applied to model system-scale MHD-ordered behaviour. I review the long-wavelength limit of standard gyrokinetics and drift kinetics to present the relationships between these theories in an elementary fashion. This provides a pathway to global gyrokinetic modelling, resulting in an approach that is structurally similar to kinetic MHD, and I present dynamical equations for solving global field evolution in this framework. Departures from certain earlier global gyrokinetic theories include the appearance of magnetosonic (fast) modes, and the cross-coupling of the parallel and perpendicular currents with perpendicular and parallel magnetic field components. A periodic two-dimensional testcase is outlined as a benchmarking and implementation target, to help clarify practical aspects of these theories, with minimal complexity in terms of boundary conditions, and a proof-of-principle implementation of a field-solver is exhibited. To motivate this work, I first illustrate certain limitations of existing global gyrokinetic frameworks and directly identify how scale separation approximations lead to certain ‘missing’ system-scale field terms in global gyrokinetics, largely as a result of simplifications associated with the field representation in terms of $A_{\|}$ and $B_{\|}$ . As a result, the currents in the gyrokinetic Ampère's law resulting from a gyrokinetic equilibrium distribution do not match the currents implied by Ampère's law in a force-balance MHD equilibrium. I present a simple choice of equilibrium distribution function whose drift-kinetic currents are consistent with MHD currents; a specific Grad–Shafranov equilibrium is used to illustrate the size of the components of the parallel currents.