Statistical analysis of Hasegawa-Wakatani turbulence

Resistive drift wave turbulence is a multipurpose paradigm that can be used to understand transport at the edge of fusion devices. The Hasegawa-Wakatani model captures the essential physics of drift turbulence while retaining the simplicity needed to gain a qualitative understanding of this process. We provide a theoretical interpretation of numerically generated probability density functions (PDFs) of intermittent events in Hasegawa-Wakatani turbulence with enforced equipartition of energy in large scale zonal flows, and small scale drift turbulence. We find that for a wide range of adiabatic index values, the stochastic component representing the small scale turbulent eddies of the flow, obtained from the autoregressive integrated moving average model, exhibits superdiffusive statistics, consistent with intermittent transport. The PDFs of large events (above one standard deviation) are well approximated by the Laplace distribution, while small events often exhibit a Gaussian character. Furthermore, there exists a strong influence of zonal flows, for example, via shearing and then viscous dissipation maintaining a sub-diffusive character of the fluxes. Published by AIP Publishing.