Radial propagation of geodesic acoustic modes

The GAM group velocity is estimated from the ratio of the radial free energy flux to the total free energy applying gyrokinetic and two-fluid theory. This method is much more robust than approaches that calculate the group velocity directly and can be generalized to include additional physics, e.g., magnetic geometry. The results are verified with the gyrokinetic code GYRO [J. Candy and R. E. Waltz, J. Comput. Phys. 186, 545 (2003)], the two-fluid code NLET [K. Hallatschek and A. Zeiler, Phys. Plasmas 7, 2554 (2000)], and analytical calculations. GAM propagation must be kept in mind when discussing the windows of GAM activity observed experimentally and the match between linear theory and experimental GAM frequencies.