Influence of hot beam ions on MHD ballooning modes in tokamaks

Abstract

It has recently been proposed that the presence of high-energy ions from neutral-beam injection can have a strong stabilizing effect on kinetically modified ideal-MHD ballooning modes in tokamaks. To assess realistically the importance of such effects, a comprehensive kinetic stability analysis, which takes into account the integral equation nature of the basic problem, has been applied to this investigation. In the collisionless limit, the effect of adding small fractions of hot beam ions is indeed found to be strongly stabilizing. On the other hand, for somewhat larger fractions of hot ions, a different, beam-driven root of the mode equations is found to occur with a growth rate comparable in magnitude to the growth rate of the usual MHD ballooning mode in the absence of hot ions. This implies that there should be an optimal density of hot particles which minimizes the strength of the relevant instabilities. Employing non-Maxwellian equilibrium distribution functions to model the beam species makes a quantitative, but not qualitative, difference in the results. Adding collisions to the calculation tends to reduce considerably the stabilizing effect of the hot ions.