SPARC-focused quasilinear saturation model for turbulent transport

Recent performance predictions of early-campaign plasmas in the SPARC tokamak have shown discrepancies between nonlinear saturated fluxes predicted by CGYRO [Candy et al., 2016] and quasilinear fluxes predicted by TGLF [Staebler et al., 2007], in particular for the particle fluxes [Rodriguez-Fernandez et al., 2020, Rodriguez-Fernandez et al., 2024]. To help resolve these discrepancies between TGLF and CGYRO in the SPARC parameter space, a new quasilinear saturation rule is being developed. A database of quasilinear TGLF and both linear and nonlinear CGYRO simulations is generated, using input parameters sampled from projected L- and H-mode scenarios in SPARC. A comparison of the linear spectra from TGLF against those from CGYRO is made to verify that the discrepancies for SPARC parameters are mainly due to the quasilinear saturation model. Several existing quasilinear saturation models [Staebler et al., 2021, Dudding et al., 2022, Citrin et al., 2017] are retuned on this new dataset. The resulting models are evaluated against CGYRO calculations for the SPARC scenarios.