Predictions of improved confinement in SPARC via energetic particle turbulence stabilization

Abstract The recent progress in high-temperature superconductor technologies has led to the design and construction of SPARC, a compact tokamak device expected to reach plasma breakeven with up to 25 MW of external ion cyclotron resonant heating (ICRH) power. This manuscript presents local (flux-tube) and radially global gyrokinetic GENE (Jenko et al 2000 Phys. Plasmas 7 1904) simulations for a reduced-field and current H-mode SPARC scenario showing that supra-thermal particles—generated via ICRH—strongly suppress ion-scale turbulent transport by triggering a fast ion-induced anomalous transport barrier. The trigger mechanism is identified as a wave-particle resonant interaction between the fast particle population and plasma micro-instabilities (Di Siena et al 2021 Phys. Rev. Lett. 125 025002). By performing a series of global simulations employing different profiles for the thermal ions, we show that the fusion gain of this SPARC scenario could be substantially enhanced by up to ∼80% by exploiting this fast ion stabilizing mechanism. A study is also presented to further optimize the energetic particle profiles, thus possibly leading experimentally to an even more significant fusion gain.