No abstract

Tokamak plasmas with reversed magnetic shear are prone to the excitation of Alfvén cascade (AC) eigenmodes by energetic particles. These modes exhibit a quasiperiodic pattern of predominantly upward frequency sweeping. Observations also reveal that the AC spectral lines sometimes bend at low frequencies, which is a significant deviation from the shear Alfvén wave dispersion relation. This paper shows that the underlying reasons for such bending are the finite pressure of the plasma and the geodesic curvature that precludes shear Alfvén perturbations from being strictly incompressible. In addition to the geodesic effect, there are two other pressure effects on shear Alfvén waves, which are the convection in the presence of an equilibrium pressure gradient and the toroidicity-induced coupling between shear Alfvén waves and acoustic modes. An analytical treatment of the problem enables a parametric comparison of all three mechanisms. The key distinction between the geodesic compressibility and the acoustic coupling is that geodesic compression occurs without plasma displacement along the magnetic-field lines. As a result, the mode phase velocity is greater than the ion thermal velocity even in an isothermal plasma, which allows the mode to avoid a strong ion Landau damping. Plasma temperature diagnostics via magnetohydrodynamic spectroscopy employing the low-frequency part of the ACs is suggested.

Numerical simulations and quantitative theoretical explanations are presented for the spontaneous formation of a hole–clump pair in phase space. The equilibrium is close to the linear threshold for instability and the destabilizing resonant kinetic drive is nearly balanced by either extrinsic dissipation or a second stabilizing resonant kinetic component. The hole and clump, each support a nonlinear wave where the trapping frequency of the particles is comparable to the kinetic linear growth rate from the destabilizing species alone. The power dissipated is balanced by energy extracted by trapped particles locked to the changing wave-phase velocities. With extrinsic dissipation, phase space structures always form just above the linear instability threshold. With a stabilizing kinetic component, an electrostatic interaction is considered with varying mass ratios of the stabilizing and destabilizing species together with collisional effects. With these input parameters, various nonlinear responses arise, only some of which sweep in frequency.

A universal integral equation has been derived and solved for the nonlinear evolution of collective modes driven by kinetic wave particle resonances just above the threshold for instability. The dominant nonlinearity stems from the dynamics of resonant particles that can be treated perturbatively near the marginal state of the system. With a resonant particle source and classical relaxation processes included, the new equation allows the determination of conditions for a soft nonlinear regime, where the saturation level is proportional to the increment above threshold, or a hard nonlinear regime, characterized by explosive behavior, where the saturation level is independent of the closeness to threshold. In the hard regime, rapid oscillations typically arise that lead to large frequency shifts in a fully developed nonlinear stage. The universality of the approach suggests that the theory applies to many types of resonant particle driven instabilities, and several specific cases, viz. energetic particle driven Alfvén wave excitation, the fishbone oscillation, and a collective mode in particle accelerators, are discussed.