Exploring the staircase to heaven: Probing the formation of layered long range order
2025 Research Campaign, Frontier Science
Purpose of Experiment
The purpose of this half-day experiment is to elucidate the physics of long-range, layered structures, called staircases. Layering is observed in turbulent mixing processes in stars, oceans, atmospheres, and magnetically confined plasmas. In a tokamak plasma, layering is manifested by the formation of an staircase – a sequence of turbulent mixing zones interspersed by shear layer mini-barriers. Here is the plasma radial electric field and is the confining toroidal magnetic field. Staircase step size defines the effective transport mixing length, and larger mixing zones can lead to the increased radial transport of particles and heat compared to common scaling laws, such as gyro-Bohm scaling. Data collected from these experiments will yield a unique set of dynamical observations which reveal staircase physics and challenge staircase models. This experiment is a part of the Frontier science program. The research effort will be a collaborative venture involving the DIII-D team members and KSTAR team members.