Kinetic Center Journal Club presents "Suprathermal Ion Transport in Turbulent Plasmas"

Suprathermal ion transport in turbulent plasmas is a major topic of research in TORPEX, a toroidal basic plasma physics device located at the Swiss Plasma Center in Lausanne, Switzerland. Through injection of lithium-6 ions with a miniature source and their detection some toroidal distance away, we have shown that cross-magnetic field transport can in general be non-diffusive. Time-resolved analysis of the detection signals has shown intermittent behavior featuring location-dependent statistics, as quantified with the skewness. We have developed a model that links the value of the time variance, the skewness and higher order moments of the suprathermal ion signals to the value of the mean at the detection location. This model has been applied to data obtained under different conditions of the suprathermal ions, including non-diffusive transport regimes. In this talk, I will present TORPEX, the intermittency features of the lithium-6 ion signals, the model that we developed to interpret their statistics and the results of applying the model to our experimental data."