Geometric gyrokinetic theory for edge plasmas

It turns out that gyrokinetic theory can be geometrically formulated as a special case of a geometrically generalized Vlasov-Maxwell system. It is proposed that the phase space of the space-time is a seven-dimensional fiber bundle P over the four-dimensional space-time M, and that a Poincare-Cartan-Einstein 1-form gamma on the seven-dimensional phase space determines a particle's worldline in the phase space. Through Liouville 6-form Omega and fiber integral, the 1-form gamma also uniquely defines a geometrically generalized Vlasov-Maxwell system as a field theory for the collective electromagnetic field. The geometric gyrokinetic theory is then developed as a special case of the geometrically generalized Vlasov-Maxwell system. In its most general form, gyrokinetic theory is about a symmetry, called gyrosymmetry, for magnetized plasmas, and the 1-form gamma again uniquely defines the gyrosymmetry. The objective is to decouple the gyrophase dynamics from the rest of the particle dynamics by finding the gyrosymmetry in gamma. Compared to other methods of deriving the gyrokinetic equations, the advantage of the geometric approach is that it allows any approximation based on mathematical simplification or physical intuition to be made at the 1-form level, and yet the field theories still have the desirable exact conservation properties, such as phase space volume conservation and energy-momentum conservation if the 1-form does not depend on the space-time coordinate explicitly. A set of generalized gyrokinetic equations valid for the edge plasmas is then derived using this geometric method. This formalism allows large-amplitude, time-dependent background electromagnetic fields to be developed fully nonlinearly in addition to small-amplitude, short-wavelength electromagnetic perturbations. The fact that we adopted the geometric method in the present study does not necessarily imply that the major results reported here cannot be achieved using classical methods. What the geometric method offers is a systematic treatment and simplified calculations. (C) 2007 American Institute of Physics.