Upstream SFINCS sources and primary literature

dkx reimplements the radially local, multi-species drift-kinetic model of the mature SFINCS code. Rather than vendoring copies of the upstream papers and internal technical notes, this documentation transcribes the physics and numerical content that dkx depends on into its own pages and cites the primary sources below.

The most important derived physics and numerical content lives in:

• Theory from the upstream SFINCS notes

• Physics reference: the radially local drift-kinetic model

• Drift-kinetic equation and system of equations

• Method overview

Published reference

The peer-reviewed description of the SFINCS model — the radially local drift-kinetic equation, the Delta/alpha/nu_n normalization, and the full-vs-DKES trajectory comparison — is:

• M. Landreman, H. M. Smith, A. Mollén, and P. Helander, “Comparison of particle trajectories and collision operators for collisional transport in nonaxisymmetric plasmas,” Physics of Plasmas 21, 042503 (2014), doi:10.1063/1.4870077.

See References and related work for the full literature list, including the Fokker–Planck operator, the orthogonal-polynomial speed grid, and the geometry/benchmark sources.

Upstream project (technical notes and manuals)

The longer-form SFINCS technical documentation — the version-3 technical notes, the single- and multi-species derivations, the Fokker–Planck implementation note, the \(\Phi_1\)/quasineutrality notes, the classical-fluxes and DKES-limit notes, and the SFINCS user manual — are unpublished upstream project documents. They are not redistributed here. Their archival home is the upstream SFINCS project repository:

• SFINCS project (github.com/landreman/sfincs)

Readers who need the original derivations should consult that repository directly. The material that dkx actually relies on is reproduced, in original prose, on the derived-theory pages linked above.