Characteristics of equilibrium and perturbed transport coefficients in tokamaks

Although the evolution of a perturbation to a tokamak equilibrium can generally be described by local transport coefficients modestly enhanced above the equilibrium values, there are some significant cases for which this is inadequate. The density profile evolution in ASDEX-U occurs far more rapidly than is consistent with reasonable particle confinement times, and the evolution of cold pulses in TEXT requires nonlocal behavior in the core and some kind of anomaly near the periphery. The experiments are suggesting effects beyond standard local turbulent transport models.