Gyro-kinetic simulations of trapped electron collision effects on low-frequency drift-wave instabilities in tokamak plasmas

Low-frequency drift-wave instabilities play a crucial role in the radial transport of present-day tokamaks, and trapped electron collisions can significantly influence these instabilities. In this paper, the effects of trapped electron collisions on these instabilities are investigated based on linear gyro-kinetic simulations. The basic numerical techniques including dispersion relation integral method and orthogonal basis function expansion are presented in detail with necessary benchmark work. The results demonstrate that in medium gradients, the increase of trapped electron proportions promotes the growth rate and radial heat transport largely for quasi-linear trapped electron modes (TEMs) and ion temperature gradient (ITG) modes. Moreover, trapped electron collisions have strong stabilizing effects, especially for TEMs driven by electron temperature gradients. Two distinctive branches, namely Mode #1 and #2, are investigated in steep gradients. Both behave in a varied instability nature during different ranges of the normalized wave vector (k) over cap (theta). Mode #1 mainly induces radial heat transport during (k) over cap (theta) <0.5 and is significantly suppressed by the collisions. Mode #2 mainly induces radial heat transport during 0.4< (k) over cap (theta) <0.8, and is largely enhanced by the collisions. When the collisionality is large enough, Mode #2 has stronger transport capacity than the other. Mode #2 at the medium wave vector, known as dissipative TEM, may provide the mechanism of the edge coherent mode observed in EAST H-mode plasmas, wherein collisionality plays an important role in the mode excitation.