Speaker
Description
Burning plasma is computationally challenging to simulate due to the multi-scale interactions between energetic particles (EPs), Alfvén eigenmodes, and microinstabilities that drive turbulence. Many studies circumvent this difficulty by focusing on a single instability and making the corresponding simplifying assumptions. However, these approximations do not necessarily preserve the global instability spectrum, leading to conflicting results and inconsistencies. In this work, we identify the minimal set of assumptions needed to model a burning plasma self-consistently with the modes and species in the system. Using the global gyrokinetic code ORB5, to systematically evaluate the impact of commonly adopted assumptions on the plasma response. We find it is essential to include Shafranov shift and finite $\beta$ effects from all magnetically confined species. Otherwise, unphysical electromagnetic modes like internal kinks and kinetic ballooning modes (KBMs) appear to dominate the instability spectrum. The EP contribution to the Shafranov shift is particularly important, stabilizing both the toroidal ion temperature gradient (ITG) and toroidal \al eigenmode (TAE) at the longer wavelengths (low toroidal mode numbers). For TAEs, these effects significantly reduce the linear growth rate, which saturates instead of proportionally increasing with EP fraction. In the nonlinear regime ITG-driven heat and particle fluxes are unaffected by the Shafranov shift in self-consistent magnetic equilibria. In contrast, under the same conditions, the TAE-driven EP fluxes are partially stabilized by the Shafranov shift, although the nonlinear saturation level of the TAE remains unchanged across all cases.