The link between toroidal flows and density blobs is experimentally demonstrated in TORPEX simple magnetized plasmas: momentum is transferred from an ideal-interchange mode to density blobs. The phase shift between the toroidal flow and the density perturbations observed in the interchange mode where the blob is born is conserved along the blob radial trajectory. This leads to dipolar structures of the blob-induced flow or to monopolar perturbations, so large that the toroidal flow gets transiently reversed. The turbulent toroidal momentum flux is dominated either by the nonlinear flux or by the convective part but not by the Reynolds stress component
Olivier Sauter, Ambrogio Fasoli, Basil Duval, Stefano Coda, Jonathan Graves, Yves Martin, Duccio Testa, Patrick Blanchard, Alessandro Pau, Cristian Sommariva, Henri Weisen, Richard Pitts, Yann Camenen, Jan Horacek, Javier García Hernández, Marco Wischmeier, Nicola Vianello, Mikhail Maslov, Federico Nespoli, Yao Zhou, David Pfefferlé, Davide Galassi, Antonio José Pereira de Figueiredo, Jonathan Marc Philippe Faustin, Liang Yao, Dalziel Joseph Wilson, Hamish William Patten, Samuel Lanthaler, Bernhard Sieglin, Otto Asunta