Chaotic transport in zonal flows in analogous geophysical and plasma systems

Journal Article · Mon May 01 04:00:00 EDT 2000 · Physics of Plasmas

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.873988· OSTI ID:20216042

Del-Castillo-Negrete, Diego ^[1]

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1. Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545 (United States)

Zonal flows occur naturally in geophysical fluids. Important examples include Jupiter's zonal flows, large scale jets in the earth's stratosphere, and oceanic jets like the Gulf Stream. These zonal flows create transport barriers that have a crucial influence on mixing and confinement. On the other hand, zonal flows have also been observed in fusion plasmas and their role in the reduction of transport has been widely recognized. Based on the analogy between Rossby waves in quasigeostrophic flows and drift waves in magnetically confined plasmas, recent models and laboratory experiments developed for studying transport in geophysical fluid dynamics are discussed in the context of plasma physics. The flows considered are not turbulent and are dominated by large scale coherent structures which we describe with simple deterministic Hamiltonian models that exhibit chaotic transport. Two transport problems are studied: the role of drift/Rossby waves in the destruction of transport barriers, and the statistics of test particle motion. It is shown that non-monotonic zonal flows close to marginal stability typically exhibit robust transport barriers at the peak velocity where the shear locally vanishes. Also, it is shown that the trapping effect of vortices combined with the zonal flows gives rise to anomalous diffusion and Levy (non-Gaussian) statistics. The models are compared with fluid laboratory experiment. (c) 2000 American Institute of Physics.

• OSTI ID: 20216042
• Journal Information: Physics of Plasmas, Journal Name: Physics of Plasmas Journal Issue: 5 Vol. 7; ISSN PHPAEN; ISSN 1070-664X
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

58 GEOSCIENCES
70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY
71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS
GENERAL PHYSICS
CHARGED-PARTICLE TRANSPORT
DIFFUSION
FLUID FLOW
FLUID MECHANICS
GEOPHYSICS
GULF STREAM
JUPITER PLANET
PLASMA JETS
STRATOSPHERE
THEORETICAL DATA