Gyrokinetic simulation of I-mode C-Mod pedestal using GENE

Naturally stable to ELMs, and with widths larger than EPED predictions, the I-modes are an excellent laboratory for investigating the role of drift microinstabilities in pedestal formation since I-mode pedestal are not ``limited'' by MHD instabilities---Peeling Ballooning or the Kinetic Ballooning. Because the Weakly Coherent Mode (WCM) is shown to be correlated, primarily, to particle transport, the pedestal heat transport, in some sense, must be controlled by drift-type modes. We present here a study based on gyrokinetic simulations (using GENE) to model heat transport in the I-mode pedestals in C-Mod. Nonlinear ETG simulations, found to be streamer-dominated, can match experimental heat flux with profile adjustment well within experimental error bars. The ETG simulations reveal very notable fine-scale structure (in the parallel direction) of the eigenfunctions in both linear and nonlinear simulations. Simulations, varying impurity level (Zeff) and temperature and density profiles (within experimental error bars), are used to probe the sensitivity of ETG heat transport to the most important input parameters. Efforts to identify an instability corresponding to the WCM will also be discussed.