THE DYNAMICS OF MARGINALITY AND SELF-ORGANIZED CRITICALITY AS A PARADIGM TURBULENT TRANSPORT

A general paradigm, based on the concept of self-organized criticality (SOC), for turbulent transport in magnetically confined plasmas, has been recently suggested as an explanation for some of the apparent dis crepancies between most theoretical models of turbulent transport and experimental observations of the transport in magnetically confined pl asmas. This model describes the dynamics of the transport without rely ing on the underlying local fluctuation mechanisms. Computations based on a cellular automata realization of such a model have found that no ise-driven SOC systems can maintain average profiles that are linearly stable (submarginal) and yet are able to sustain active transport dyn amics. It is also found that the dominant scales in the transport dyna mics in the absence of sheared flaw are system scales rather than the underlying local fluctuation scales. The addition of sheared flow into the dynamics leads to a large reduction of the system-scale transport events and a commensurate increase in the fluctuation-scale transport events needed to maintain the constant flux. The dynamics of these mo dels and the potential ramifications for transport studies are discuss ed. (C) 1996 American Institute of Physics.