Diffusion of magnetic field lines in a confined RFP plasma

A volume-preserving symplectic map is proposed to describe the magnetic field lines when the Taylor equilibrium is perturbed in a genetic way. The standard scenario is observed by varying the perturbation strength, but the statistical properties in the chaotic regions are not simple due to the presence of boundaries and remnants of invariant structures. Simpler models of volume-preserving maps are proposed. The slowly modulated standard map captures the basic topological and statistical features. The diffusion is analytically described for large perturbations (above the break-up of the last KAM torus) in terms of correlation functions and for small perturbations using the adiabatic theory, provided that the modulation is sufficiently slow.