Analysis of the isotropic and anisotropic Grad-Shafranov equation

Abstract

Pressure anisotropy is a commonly observed phenomenon in tokamak plasmas, due to external heating methods such as neutral beam injection and ion-cyclotron resonance heating. Equilibrium models for tokamaks are constructed by solving the Grad-Shafranov equation; such models, however, do not account for pressure anisotropy since ideal magnetohydrodynamics assumes a scalar pressure. A modified Grad-Shafranov equation can be derived to include anisotropic pressure and toroidal flow by including drift-kinetic effects from the guiding-centre model of particle motion. In this work, we have studied the mathematical well-posedness of these two problems by showing the existence and uniqueness of solutions to the Grad-Shafranov equation both in the standard isotropic case and when including pressure anisotropy and toroidal flow. A new fixed-point approach is used to show the existence of solutions in the Sobolev space to the Grad-Shafranov equation, and sufficient criteria for their uniqueness are derived. The conditions required for the existence of solutions to the modified Grad-Shafranov equation are also constructed. Show more