Characterization of intermittency of impurity turbulent transport in tokamak edge plasmas

The statistical properties of impurity transport of a tokamak edge plasma embedded in a dissipative drift-wave turbulence are investigated using structure function analysis. The impurities are considered as a passive scalar advected by the plasma flow. Two cases of impurity advection are studied and compared: A decaying impurities case (given by a diffusion-advection equation) and a driven case (forced by a mean scalar gradient). The use of extended self-similarity enables us to show that the relative scaling exponent of structure functions of impurity density and vorticity exhibit similar multifractal scaling in the decaying case and follows the She-Leveque model. However, this property is invalidated for the impurity driven advection case. For both cases, potential fluctuations are self-similar and exhibit a monofractal scaling in agreement with Kolmogorov-Kraichnan theory for two-dimensional turbulence. These results obtained with a passive scalar model agree also with test-particle simulations. (c) 2008 American Institute of Physics.