Impurity transport driven by ion temperature gradient turbulence in tokamak plasmas

Impurity transport driven by electrostatic turbulence is analyzed in weakly collisional tokamak plasmas using a semianalytical model based on a boundary layer solution of the gyrokinetic equation. Analytical expressions for the perturbed density responses are derived and used to determine the stability boundaries and the quasilinear particle fluxes. For moderate impurity charge number Z, the stability boundaries are very weakly affected by the increasing impurity charge for constant effective charge, while for lower impurity charge the influence of impurities is larger, if the amount of impurities is not too small. Scalings of the mode frequencies and quasilinear fluxes with charge number, effective charge, impurity density scale length, and collisionality are determined and compared to quasilinear gyrokinetic simulations with GYRO [J. Candy and R. E. Waltz, J. Comput. Phys. 186, 545 (2003)] resulting in very good agreement. Collisions do not affect the mode frequencies, growth rates, and impurity fluxes significantly. The eigenfrequencies and growth rates depend only weakly on Z and Z(eff) but they are sensitive to the impurity density gradient scale length. An analytical approximate expression of the zero-flux impurity density gradient is derived and used to discuss its parametric dependencies. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3430639]