arXiv subjects

Motoki Nakata

Publications and source records attributed to Motoki Nakata.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Impact of geodesic curvature on zonal flow generation in magnetically confined plasmas

The impact of magnetic geometry on zonal-flow generation in ion temperature gradient driven turbulence is investigated by means of linear and nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations. The modulation of geodesic curvature on various configurations has revealed amplification of the zonal-flow intensity in relatively smaller geodesic curvature. Based on these findings, a nonlinear proxy model for explorations of a novel magnetic geometry to activate the zonal-flow dynamics is proposed.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2026

Nonlinear entropy transfer via zonal flows in gyrokinetic plasma turbulence

Nonlinear entropy transfer processes in toroidal ion temperature gradient (ITG) and electron temperature gradient (ETG) driven turbulence are investigated based on the gyrokinetic entropy balance relations for zonal and non-zonal modes, which are coupled through the entropy transfer function regarded as a kinetic extension of the zonal-flow production due to the Reynolds stress. Spectral analyses of the "triad" entropy transfer function introduced in this study reveal not only the nonlinear interactions among the zonal and non-zonal modes, but also their effects on the turbulent transport level. Different types of the entropy transfer processes between the ITG and ETG turbulence are found: The entropy transfer from non-zonal to zonal modes is substantial in the saturation phase of the ITG instability, while, once the strong zonal flow is generated, the entropy transfer to the zonal modes becomes quite weak in the steady turbulence state. Instead, the zonal flows mediate the entropy transfer from non-zonal modes with low radial-wavenumbers (with contribution to the heat flux) to the other non-zonal modes with higher radial-wavenumbers (but with less contribution to the heat flux) through the triad interaction. The successive entropy transfer processes to the higher radial-wavenumber modes are associated with transport regulation in the steady turbulence state. In contrast, in both the instability-saturation and steady phases of the ETG turbulence, the entropy transfer processes among low-wavenumber non-zonal modes are dominant rather than the transfer via zonal modes.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2026

Isotope Effects on TEM-driven Turbulence and Zonal Flows in Helical and Tokamak Plasmas

Impacts of isotope ion mass on trapped electron mode (TEM) driven turbulence and zonal flows in magnetically confined fusion plasmas are investigated. Gyrokinetic simulations of TEM-driven turbulence in three-dimensional magnetic configuration of LHD plasmas with hydrogen isotope ions and real-mass kinetic electrons are realized for the first time, and the linear and the nonlinear nature of the isotope and collisional effects on the turbulent transport and zonal-flow generation is clarified. It is newly found that combined effects of the collisional TEM stabilization by the isotope ions and the associated increase in the impacts of the steady zonal flows at the near-marginal linear stability lead to the significant transport reduction with the opposite ion mass dependence in comparison to the conventional gyro-Bohm scaling. The universal nature of the isotope effects on the TEM-driven turbulence and zonal flows is verified for a wide variety of toroidal plasmas, e.g., axisymmetric tokamak and non-axisymmetric helical/stellarator systems.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2026

Gyrokinetic turbulent transport simulations on steady burning condition in D-T-He plasmas

Ion temperature gradient(ITG) and trapped electron modes(TEM) driven turbulent transport in an ITER-like plasma is investigated by means of multi-species gyrokinetic Vlasov simulations with D, T, He, and real-mass kinetic electrons including their inter-species collisions. Beyond the conventional zero-dimensional power balance analysis presuming the global energy and particle confinement times, gyrokinetic-simulation-based evaluation of a steady burning condition with He-ash exhaust and D-T fuel inward pinch is demonstrated. It is clarified that a significant imbalance appears in the turbulent particle flux for the fuel ions of D and T, depending on the D-T density ratio and the He-ash accumulation. Then several profile regimes to satisfy Reiter's steady burning condition are, for the first time, identified by the gyrokinetic simulation. Also, the impacts of zonal flows and nonthermal He-ash on the optimal profile regimes are examined.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2026

Out-of-time-ordered correlators for turbulent fields: a quantum-classical correspondence

An extended formulation of out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs), which quantify noncommutative operator growth and information scrambling in quantum many-body systems, is developed for turbulence dynamics as a representative of non-canonical Hamiltonian systems. Based on the Wigner-Weyl transform and the Moyal bracket formalism, the semiclassical limit of OTOC for turbulent plasmas governed by the Hasegawa-Mima equation is derived as an ensemble-averaged squared Lie-Poisson bracket between two chosen functionals of the turbulent fields. The classical-limit OTOC provides a quantitative measure of how a variational perturbation applied to one functional propagates across scales in the turbulent dynamics and how it affects another functional at a later time, thereby capturing scale-dependent or field-dependent transfer processes. In a quasilinear approximation with a strong zonal flow, we provide a closed analytic expression of the classical-limit OTOC to characterize the interaction between zonal and non-zonal modes. An asymptotic analysis shows that the OTOC grows quadratically at early time, while in the long-time strong-shear regime it approaches a finite saturated value with an inverse-square algebraic dependence. This behavior is attributed to zonal-flow shearing, which rapidly scrambles the non-zonal perturbation toward higher wavenumbers, thereby reducing the low-wavenumber non-zonal content that can feed back onto large-scale zonal modes.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2026

von Neumann entropy of phase space structures in gyrokinetic plasma turbulence

We introduce a data-driven diagnostic that combines the singular value decomposition (SVD) with an information-theoretic entropy to quantify the phase-space complexity of perturbed distribution functions in gyrokinetic turbulence. Applying this framework to nonlinear flux-tube simulations that solve the time evolution of the ion distribution function represented by Fourier modes with the wavenumber for real space, we define the von Neumann entropy (vNE) to analyze the velocity-space structure. A global survey in the wavenumber space reveals a wavenumber-dependent variation of the vNE in velocity-space structure: the vNE remains low at low wavenumber but increases across $k_\perp\rho_{t\mathrm{i}}\sim 1$. Hermite/Laguerre decompositions revealed that the finite Larmor radius (FLR) phase mixing in the perpendicular (magnetic-moment) direction is active. Simultaneously, the systematic increase in vNE for $k_\perp\rho_{t\mathrm{i}}$ correlates with the broadening of the Hermite spectrum, suggesting enhanced parallel phase mixing (Landau resonance) as the primary mechanism for the observed wave number dependence. These results demonstrate that the SVD-based vNE provides a compact measure of kinetic complexity without assuming a predefined basis and enables a global mapping of its wavenumber dependence of phase-mixing processes in gyrokinetic turbulence.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2025

Landscape computations for the edge of chaos in nonlinear dynamical systems

We propose a stochastic sampling approach to identify stability boundaries in general dynamical systems. The global landscape of Lyapunov exponent in multi-dimensional parameter space provides transition boundaries for stable/unstable trajectories, i.e., the edge of chaos. Despite its usefulness, it is generally difficult to derive analytically. In this study, we reveal the transition boundaries by leveraging the Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm coupled directly with the numerical integration of nonlinear differential/difference equation. It is demonstrated that a posteriori modeling for parameter subspace along the edge of chaos determines an inherent constrained dynamical system to flexibly activate or de-activate the chaotic tra jectories.

nlin.CD↗

arXiv2024

Convergence study of multi-field singular value decomposition for turbulence fields

Convergence of a matrix decomposition technique, the multi-field singular value decomposition (MFSVD) which efficiently analyzes nonlinear correlations by simultaneously decomposing multiple fields, is investigated. Toward applications in turbulence studies, we demonstrate that SVD for an artificial matrix with multi-scale structures reproduces the power-law-like distribution in the singular value spectrum with several orthogonal modes. Then, MFSVD is applied to practical turbulence field data produced by numerical simulations. It is clarified that relative errors in the reproduction of quadratic nonlinear quantities in multi-field turbulence converge remarkably faster than the single-field case, which requires thousands of modes to converge.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2024

Quantum-inspired information entropy in multi-field turbulence

A novel information entropy of turbulence systems with multiple field quantities is formulated. Inspired by quantum mechanics, the von Neumann entropy (vNE) and the entanglement entropy(EE) are derived from a density matrix for the turbulence state in terms of the multi-field singular value decomposition (MFSVD). Applying the information-theoretic entropy analyses to spatio-temporal dynamics in turbulent plasmas with phase-transition-like behavior, we discover a new nontrivial transition threshold regarding the vNE, which significantly deviates from the transition threshold of the field energy considered in the conventional approaches. These findings provide us with new classifications of the turbulence state in terms of combined energy and information. It is also shown that the EE for nonlinear interactions in turbulence simultaneously describes not only the information for the strength of nonlinear mode couplings but also the direction of net energy transfer.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2021

Multi-Scale Deep Learning for Estimating Horizontal Velocity Fields on the Solar Surface

The dynamics in the photosphere is governed by the multi-scale turbulent convection termed as granulation and supergranulation. It is important to derive 3-dimensional velocity vectors to understand the nature of the turbulent convection. However, it is difficult to obtain the velocity component perpendicular to the line-of-sight, which corresponds to the horizontal velocity in disk center observations. We developed a convolutional neural network model with a multi-scale deep learning architecture. The method consists of multiple convolutional kernels with various sizes of the receptive fields, and it performs convolution for spatial and temporal axes. The network is trained with data from three different numerical simulations of turbulent convection, and we introduced a coherence spectrum to assess the horizontal velocity fields that were derived at each spatial scale. The multi-scale deep learning method successfully predicts the horizontal velocities for each convection simulation in terms of the global-correlation-coefficient, which is often used for evaluating the prediction accuracy of the methods. The coherence spectrum reveals the strong dependence of the correlation coefficients on the spatial scales. Although coherence spectra are higher than 0.9 for large-scale structures, they drastically decrease to less than 0.3 for small-scale structures wherein the global-correlation-coefficient indicates a high value of approximately 0.95. We determined that this decrease in the coherence spectrum occurs around the energy injection scales. The accuracy for the small-scale structures is not guaranteed solely by the global-correlation-coefficient. To improve the accuracy in small-scales, it is important to improve the loss function for enhancing the small-scale structures and to utilize other physical quantities related to the non-linear cascade of convective eddies as input data.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2020

Study of the Dynamics of Convective Turbulence in the Solar Granulation by Spectral Line Broadening and Asymmetry

In the quiet regions on the solar surface, turbulent convective motions of granulation play an important role in creating small-scale magnetic structures, as well as in energy injection into the upper atmosphere. The turbulent nature of granulation can be studied using spectral line profiles, especially line broadening, which contains information on the flow field smaller than the spatial resolution of an instrument. Moreover, the Doppler velocity gradient along a line-of-sight (LOS) causes line broadening as well. However, the quantitative relationship between velocity gradient and line broadening has not been understood well. In this study, we perform bisector analyses using the spectral profiles obtained using the Spectro-Polarimeter of the Hinode/Solar Optical Telescope to investigate the relationship of line broadening and bisector velocities with the granulation flows. The results indicate that line broadening has a positive correlation with the Doppler velocity gradients along the LOS. We found excessive line broadening in fading granules, that cannot be explained only by the LOS velocity gradient, although the velocity gradient is enhanced in the process of fading. If this excessive line broadening is attributed to small-scale turbulent motions, the averaged turbulent velocity is obtained as 0.9 km/s.

astro-ph.SR↗