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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Nonlocal current-driven heat flow in ideal plasmas

Nicholas Mitchell1, David Chapman2, and Grigory Kagan1

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Phys. Rev. E 112, L053202 – Published 24 November, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/jn8x-nfv2

Abstract

Electron heat flux is an important and often dominant mechanism of energy transport in a variety of collisional plasmas in a confined fusion or astrophysical context. While nonlocal conductive heat transport, driven by strong temperature gradients, has been investigated extensively in previous literature, nonlocal regimes of the current-driven heat flow and friction have not received the same attention. In this Letter, a first-principles reduced kinetic method is applied to study nonlocal effects on current-driven transport. In addition to nonlocality due to sharp gradients, sufficiently large currents are found to significantly enhance current-driven heat flux due to a novel nonlocal mechanism, with this enhancement being increasingly prevalent for higher effective ionizations Z*. Introducing the dimensionless number Nu≡|ue−ui|/vth,e, these enhancements occur for even relatively weak flows Nu≳1/100, analogously to standard nonlocal effects becoming significant for Knudsen numbers NK≳1/100.

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Phys. Rev. E 112, L053202– Published 24 November, 2025
  • Received 23 July 2025
  • Accepted 7 November 2025
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