Experimental studies of electron transport

Electron transport in tokamaks has many different features which are briefly reviewed. The paper is focused on electron heat transport in conventional tokamak plasmas. An inter-machine comparison indicates that the non-dimensional gradient length of the electron temperature profiles R/L-Te, is almost independent of the devices and varies little with plasma parameters. This strongly suggests that electron heat transport is governed by turbulence with a threshold in R/L-Te.. This is confirmed by modulation experiments using electron cyclotron heating. Simulations with empirical and physics-based transport models confirm this assumption.