Observation of reduced-turbulence regime with tungsten injection in HL-2A edge plasmas

A reduced-turbulence regime has been observed in HL-2A NBI-heated deuterium plasmas. The transition to this regime is achieved by injecting a certain amount of tungsten into the plasma based on the laser blow-off technique. It has been found that the amplitude of geodesic acoustic mode (GAM) zonal flow and turbulent vortex size together with eddy tilting angle are all significantly increased in the edge region after tungsten injection. However, the frequency of GAM zonal flow remains nearly unchanged. Measurement shows the nonlinear coupling degree of turbulence dramatically increases while the collisional damping of GAM zonal flow drops slightly. We conclude that the increased nonlinear coupling is the main cause of the excitation of GAM zonal flow, which consequently results in the reduction in turbulent transport as observed in this experiment. These results indicate that tungsten ions play an active role in turbulence-GAM dynamics through a symmetry-breaking mechanism, which could help us to better understand the inherent physical mechanisms governing turbulent transport in the presence of high-Z impurity ions in fusion plasmas.