Resistive interchange modes can be driven unstable by large pressure gradients in the negative central magnetic shear (NCS) region of advanced tokamaks. Localized stability analysis reveals that the resistive interchange stability criterion (D-R less than or equal to 0) is violated in this region, and unstable n = 1 localized resistive magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) modes are computed using the resistive MHD code MARS. In DIII-D NCS plasmas, these instabilities appear as bursting MHD activities, constituting the first identification of resistive interchange in a high temperature tokamak experiment. These bursts also appear to play a role in triggering disruptions.
Olivier Sauter, Ambrogio Fasoli, Basil Duval, Stefano Coda, Jonathan Graves, Yves Martin, Duccio Testa, Patrick Blanchard, Alessandro Pau, Cristian Sommariva, Henri Weisen, Richard Pitts, Yann Camenen, Jan Horacek, Javier García Hernández, Marco Wischmeier, Nicola Vianello, Mikhail Maslov, Federico Nespoli, Yao Zhou, David Pfefferlé, Davide Galassi, Antonio José Pereira de Figueiredo, Jonathan Marc Philippe Faustin, Liang Yao, Dalziel Joseph Wilson, Hamish William Patten, Samuel Lanthaler, Bernhard Sieglin, Otto Asunta