Application of an improved control-variate scheme to local neoclassical transport simulations

A new radially local neoclassical transport code is developed based on the radially global two-weight δfδf Monte Carlo code, FORTEC-3D (Satake et al., 2008). In the collisional two-weight δfδf method, the variance of weight increases in time due to the so-called weight spreading, which leads to an increasing numerical noise in long time simulations. A new improved control-variate scheme was proposed by Kleiber et al. (2011) to reduce the variance. We investigate the effectiveness and validity of the new control-variate scheme for a practical collisional transport problem in a plasma described by the drift kinetic equation. It is demonstrated that the new scheme reduces the variance of weight by approximately 75% in an axisymmetric magnetic field configuration. The burst-like behavior of a transport observable caused by a large numerical noise can be avoided. As a result, the time evolution of a transport observable can be successfully smoothed.