PPPL-4139 is available in pdf format (963 KB).

Interchange and Infernal Fishbone Modes in Plasmas with Tangentially Injected Beams

Authors: Ya.I. Kolesnichenko, V.S. Marchenko, and R.B. White

Date of PPPL Report: January 2006

Submitted to: Physics of Plasmas

New energetic particle mode instabilities of fishbone type are predicted. The considered instabilities are driven by the circulating energetic ions. They can arise in plasmas of tokamaks and spherical tori with weak magnetic shear in the wide core region and strong shear at the periphery, provided that the central safety factor is close to the ratio m/n, where m and n are the poloidal mode number and toroidal mode number, respectively. The instability with m = n = 1 has interchange-like spatial structure, whereas the structure of instabilities with m/n > 1 is similar to that of the infernal MHD mode (except for the region in vicinity of the local Alfvén resonance).