Diamagnetic Fishbone Mode Associated with Circulating Fast Ions in Spherical Tokamaks
Authors: Ya.I. Kolesnichenko, V.S. Marchenko, and R.B. White
Date of PPPL Report: June 2001
Presented at: the 28th EPS Conference on Controlled Fusion and Plasma Physics, Madeira, Portugal, June 18-22, 2001.
Recently it was shown theoretically that high beta (beta is the ratio of the plasma pressure to the magnetic field pressure) inherent to plasmas of Spherical Tokamaks (ST) stabilizes the fishbone mode associated with the trapped particles. This prediction agrees with the experimental observations of the fishbone behavior on the Small Tight Aspect Ratio Tokamak (START). However, in the mentioned experiments the circulating particles rather than the trapped ones were dominant in the energetic ion population. Therefore, the theory of Kolesnichenko, et al. in Phys. Rev. Lett. 82(1999) 3260 and Nuclear Fusion 40 (2000) 1731 is not sufficient to explain the START experiment and predict the behavior of the circulating-particle-induced fishbone mode in future experiments on STs. Thus, a new theory is required, which stimulated the fulfillment of this present work. There are two fishbone branches: the high-frequency (precession) branch and the low-frequency (diamagnetic) one. In this work, we restrict ourselves with the study of the low-frequency branch. The stability of this branch associated with the circulating particles in a low-beta plasma was studied by Betti, et al. in Phys. Rev. Lett. 70 (1993) 3428; no attempts to consider high beta plasmas were done yet.