In some magnetically confined plasmas, an applied pulse of rapid edge cooling can trigger either a positive or negative excursion in the core electron temperature from its steady state value. We present a new model which captures the time evolution of the transient, non-diffusive local dynamics in the core plasma. We show quantitative agreement between this model and recent spatially localized measurements (Inagaki et al 2010 Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion52 075002) of the local time-evolving temperature pulse in cold pulse propagation experiments in the Large Helical Device.
Propagation of cold pulses and heat pulses in ASDEX Upgrade