Gyrokinetic simulation of kinetic ballooning mode driven turbulence

Maeyama, Shinya; Ishizawa, Akihiro*; Watanabe, Tomohiko*; Nakata, Motoki; Idomura, Yasuhiro   

The normalized plasma pressure beta is one of the important parameters to the improvement of the magnetic plasma confinement. It is important to understand how the high-beta turbulence differs from the low-beta (or electrostatic) turbulence and to predict transport levels in the high-beta regime. We have applied the analysis of the entropy balance relation for each species to the kinetic-ballooning-mode-driven (KBM) turbulence in a high-beta regime. The results show that the entropy transfer from ions to electrons through the field-particle interactions and fine-scale generations by electrons are important mechanisms for the saturation of KBM turbulence, as well as the EB nonlinearity.