Collisionless zonal-flow dynamics in quasisymmetric stellarators

The linear collisionless plasma response to a zonal-density perturbation in quasisymmetric stellarators is studied, including the geodesic-acoustic-mode oscillations and the Rosenbluth-Hinton residual flow. While the geodesic-acoustic-mode oscillations in quasiaxisymmetric configurations are similar to tokamaks, they become non-existent in quasi-helically symmetric configurations when the effective safety factor in helical-angle coordinates is small. Compared with concentric-circular tokamaks, the Rosenbluth-Hinton residual is also found to be multiplied by a geometric factor that arises from the flux-surface-averaged classical polarization. Using the near-axis-expansion framework, we derive an analytic expression for, which varies significantly among different configurations. These analytic results are compared with numerical simulation results from the global gyrokinetic particle-in-cell code GTC, and good agreement with the theoretical Rosenbluth-Hinton residual level is achieved when the quasisymmetry error is small enough.