A gyrokinetic model of lithium lined plasmas

A key challenge in magnetic confinement fusion is the interaction between the walls of a device and the high temperature plasma, as the walls can damage and reduce theplasma temperature. Adding lithium to plasma-facing components provides the oppor-tunity to replenish the metal surface as it becomes damaged, and significantly reducesrecycling, allowing the edge to operate at much higher temperatures. The goal of thisproject is to develop a gyrokinetic simulation of the scrape-off layer (SOL) of plasmas inlithium-lined tokamaks, such as PPPL's LTX. LTX is the first tokamak to implement fullyliquid lithium walls, which have been shown experimentally to support flat temperatureprofiles, with SOL temperatures exceeding 100 keV. Commonly used fluid SOL modelsand simulations are relatively affordable but unjustified in the high-temperature, largelycollisionless environment of LTX's SOL. In this work we instead develop a gyrokineticsimulation of an LTX-like SOL plasma and present the effect that LTX-like parametershave on potential profile formation, plasma fluxes at the wall. This project will supple-ment current understanding of the effect of lithium walls on plasma performance, withthe key benefit of providing a lower collisionality model.