UC San Diego

Recent experiments showed a decrease of long range correlations during the application of resonant magnetic perturbations (RMPs) [Y. Xu et al., Nucl. Fusion 51, 063020 (2011)]. This finding suggests that RMPs damp zonal flows. To elucidate the effect of the RMPs on zonal structures in drift wave turbulence, we construct a generalized Hasegawa-Wakatani model including RMP fields. The effect of the RMPs is to induce a linear coupling between the zonal electric field and the zonal density gradient, which drives the system to a state of electron radial force balance for large RMP amplitude. A predator-prey model coupling the primary drift wave dynamics to the zonal modes evolution is derived. This model has both turbulence drive and RMP amplitude as control parameters and predicts a novel type of transport bifurcation in the presence of RMPs. The novel regime has a power threshold which increases with RMP amplitude as γc~[δBrB]2.