Experiments and gyrokinetic simulations of the nonlinear interaction between spinning magnetized plasma pressure filaments

A set of experiments using controlled, skin depth-sized plasma pressure filaments in close proximity have been carried out in a large linear magnetized plasma device. Two- and three-filament configurations have been used to determine the scale of cross field nonlinear interaction. When the filaments are separated by a distance of approximately five times the size of a single filament or less, a significant transfer of charge and energy occurs, leading to the generation of inter-filament electric fields. This has the effect of rotating the filaments and influencing the merging dynamics. Nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations using seeded filaments confirm the presence of unstable drift-Alfvén modes driven by the steep electron temperature gradient. When the filaments are within a few collisionless electron skin depths (separations twice the size of a single filament), the unstable perturbations drive the convective mixing of the density and temperature and rearrange the gradients such that they maximize in the region surrounding the filament bundle.