Gyrokinetic penetration of resonant magnetic perturbations into tokamak pedestal and core

Suppression of ELM crashes using a set of external resonant magnetic perturbation (RMP) coils is planned in ITER and could be critical for its success. So far, only special MHD and fluid codes have been used to understand the penetration of RMPs into the pedestal and core plasma while neglecting or simplistically modeling important kinetic physics. We report the first successful simulation of gyrokinetic RMP penetration in a realistic tokamak geometry, including the separatrix, using the total-f gyrokinetic particle-in-cell code XGC that simulates neoclassical physics, neutral particle recycling and electromagnetic turbulence together. We study a DIII-D RMP ELM-suppressed H-mode discharge [S. Gu et al., Nuclear Fusion 59, 026012 (2019)] and compare the gyrokinetic penetration calculation against M3D-C1’s MHD results. We discuss the possible existence of magnetic islands and stochastic magnetic perturbations due to RMPs at the pedestal top and deeper into the core plasma as implied by experimental observations, and how the gyrokinetic density pump-out and electron/ion thermal transport compare with the experimental observations.