Accelerating simulations of electromagnetic waves in hot, magnetized fusion plasmas

Abstract

Abstract Accurate simulations of the behavior of RF waves in hot, magnetized fusion plasmas have traditionally been computationally demanding due to the integro-differential character of the hot plasma wave equation. In this work a method is described that allows the integral in the hot-plasma wave equation to be rewritten as a set of differential operators by fitting a polynomial through the dielectric tensor components. This approach is applied to a one-dimensional simulation with typical profiles and plasma parameters for the JET fusion reactor. The accuracy and computational time are compared with an all-orders model and a truncated Finite Larmor Radius model. It is shown that the proposed method can be used to achieve accuracies previously only obtained with extremely heavy all-orders models like the two-dimensional AORSA code, but at significantly reduced computational costs. The MATLAB code that has been developed in this work is available under the GPLv3 licence.