Quick search Find article
Quick search
Find article

Stability of coupled tearing modes in tokamaks

R. Fitzpatrick, R.J. Hastie, T.J. Martin and C.M. Roach

Show affiliations


The general coupled tearing-mode dispersion relation is investigated in tokamaks. A differential rotation of rational surfaces in high temperature devices is found to decouple low amplitude modes, so that they only reconnect magnetic flux at one surface in the plasma and behave ideally at the remaining surfaces. Above a threshold mode amplitude, the rational surfaces start to lock together, permitting modes to develop which simultaneously reconnect magnetic flux at more than one surface. Such modes are generally more unstable than uncoupled modes. Ideal rational surfaces, on which there is no reconnection, located close to the plasma edge are found to shield free-boundary tearing modes from the destabilizing influence of external-kink modes. The threshold mode amplitude required to lock coupled rational surfaces decreases rapidly with increasing machine dimensions

PACS

52.35.Py Macroinstabilities (hydromagnetic, e.g., kink, fire-hose, mirror, ballooning, tearing, trapped-particle, flute, Rayleigh-Taylor, etc.)

52.40.Hf Plasma-material interactions; boundary layer effects

52.55.Fa Tokamaks, spherical tokamaks

Subjects

Plasma physics

Dates

Issue 10 (October 1993)



Users also read

What's this?
This innovative new feature generates a list of articles 'also read' by other users based on them reading the original article. Article abstracts citations and references are all considered and weighted accordingly. We hope that this will help you find relevant papers for your research.

  1. Overview of experimental results on HL-2A

View by subject




Export








Please login to access our web services, or create an account if you don't yet have one.

You must have cookies enabled in your web browser to be able to login.

Username
Password

Forgotten your password? Get a new one here.