Intrinsic rotation driven by the electrostatic turbulence in up-down asymmetric toroidal plasmas

The transport of parallel momentum by small scale fluctuations is intrinsically linked to symmetry breaking in the direction of the magnetic field. In tokamaks, an up-down asymmetry in the equilibrium proves to be an efficient parallel symmetry breaking mechanism leading to the generation of a net radial flux of parallel momentum by the electrostatic turbulence [Y. Camenen et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 125001 (2009)]. This flux is neither proportional to the toroidal rotation nor to its gradient and arises from an incomplete cancellation of the local contributions to the parallel momentum flux under the flux surface average. The flux of parallel momentum then depends on the asymmetry of the curvature drift and on the extension of the fluctuations around the low field side midplane. In this paper, the mechanisms underlying the generation of the flux of parallel momentum are highlighted and the main dependences on plasma parameters investigated using linear gyrokinetic simulations.