Linear gyrokinetic calculations of toroidal momentum transport in the presence of trapped electron modes in tokamak plasmas

The toroidal momentum transport in the presence of trapped electron mode microinstabilities in tokamak plasmas is studied by means of quasilinear gyrokinetic calculations. In particular, the role of the Coriolis drift in producing an inward convection of toroidal momentum is investigated. The Coriolis drift term has been implemented in the gyrokinetic code GS2 [W. Dorland et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 5579 (2000)] specifically for the completion of this work. A benchmark between the GS2 implementation of the Coriolis drift and the implementations included in two other gyrokinetic codes is presented. The numerical calculations show that in the presence of trapped electron modes, despite of a weaker symmetry breaking of the eigenfunctions with respect to the case of ion temperature gradient modes, a pinch of toroidal momentum is produced in most conditions. The toroidal momentum viscosity is also computed, and found to be small as compared with the electron heat conductivity, but significantly larger than the ion heat conductivity. In addition, interesting differences are found in the dependence of the toroidal momentum pinch as a function of collisionality between trapped electron modes and ion temperature gradient modes. The results identify also parameter domains in which the pinch is predicted to be small, which are also of interest for comparisons with the experiments.