Generation and saturation of large-scale flows in flute turbulence

The excitation and suppression of large-scale anisotropic modes during the temporal evolution of a magnetic-curvature-driven electrostatic flute instability are numerically investigated. The formation of streamerlike structures is attributed to the linear development of the instability while the subsequent excitation of the zonal modes is the result of the nonlinear coupling between linearly grown flute modes. When the amplitudes of the zonal modes become of the same order as that of the streamer modes, the flute instabilities get suppressed and poloidal (zonal) flows dominate. In the saturated state that follows, the dominant large-scale modes of the potential and the density are self-organized in different ways, depending on the value of the ion temperature. (C) 2005 American Institute of Physics.