Nonlocal heat transport in plasmas down steep temperature gradients

An analytic solution to the problem of nonlocal heat transport in plasmas by electrons whose range is not short compared to the temperature scale length is presented. The formalism extends the results of Albritton et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 57, 1887 (1986)] to an arbitrary ionization state Z. This simple transport scheme is checked against recent experiments in the AURORA device [Phys. Fluids B 1, 741 (1989)]. The agreement, both for the measured cold electron temperature profile and the plasma potential, is very good and comparable to the result of full kinetic calculations