Electron collisions in the trapped gyro-Landau fluid transport model

Accurately modeling electron collisions in the trapped gyro-Landau fluid (TGLF) equations has been a major challenge. Insights gained from numerically solving the gyrokinetic equation have lead to a significant improvement of the low order TGLF model. The theoretical motivation and verification of this model with the velocity-space gyrokinetic code GYRO [J. Candy and R. E. Waltz, J. Comput. Phys. 186, 545 (2003)] will be presented. The improvement in the fidelity of TGLF to GYRO is shown to also lead to better prediction of experimental temperature profiles by TGLF for a dedicated collision frequency scan. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3505308]