Global approach to the spectral problem of microinstabilities in a cylindrical plasma using a gyrokinetic model

Considering the spectral problem of microinstabilities in a curved system, methods for solving the global gyrokinetic equation are presented for the simple case of a cylindrical plasma. They prove to be efficient for computing the full unstable spectrum of ion temperature gradient (ITG) type modes and have shown to be applicable to the two-dimensional integral equation of tokamak configurations. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics.