Characteristics of a high-temperature, collisionless edge in a liquid lithium walled tokamak

Liquid lithium (Li) plasma facing components (PFCs) can be used to mitigate the detrimental effects of high plasma heat fluxes impinging on PFCs. Under the extreme heat flux exiting the plasma, liquid Li evaporates and can either produce Li vapor cloud that provides some of the same benefits of impurity-seeded detachment, or it can be replenished to protect PFCs in future shots. Liquid Li also retains the impacting hydrogenic ions and precludes them from recycling, which shuts off both an important fueling source but also a cooling mechanism in typical high-recycling plasmas. The ensuing low-recycling, hot tokamak edge plasmas exhibit unique kinetic features that have been insufficiently explored. This work presents a computational characterization of low-recycling, liquid Li-walled plasmas through the lens of the full-f gyrokinetic solver in Gkeyll. We show how changes in geometry, fueling and recycling lead to different kinetic characteristics and how they compare to observations in the Lithium Tokamak eXperiment (LTX-ß).