Transport in axisymmetric plasmas

The general case of transport in axisymmetric fully ionized quasineutral plasmas is formulated for systems immersed in a strong magnetic field and close to local kinetic equilibrium. The particle density and temperature for each species, which depend on position only via the magnetic streamfunction, obey a closed system of transport equations involving coefficients which can be optimally computed via minimax variational principles. The electric field is eliminated from the transport equations, apart from the electrostatic potential which is obtained from a rate equation, as is the toroidal magnetic field. The magnetic streamfunction is determined by an elliptic boundary value problem. The theory goes over to previous work in the limit where the frequency associated with the guiding center motion of a representative particle in the absence of collisions is much greater than the collision frequency, and vice versa.