Comprehensive electrostatic gyrokinetic linear stability calculations for ion-scale microinstabilities in an LHD plasma with an ion-internal transport barrier (ITB) and carbon “impurity hole” are used to make quasilinear estimates of particle flux to explore whether microturbulence can explain the observed outward carbon fluxes that flow “up” the impurity density gradient. The ion temperature is not stationary in the ion-ITB phase of the simulated discharge, during which the core carbon density decreases continuously. To fully sample these varying conditions, the calculations are carried out at three radial locations and four times. The plasma parameter inputs are based on experimentally measured profiles of electron and ion temperature, as well as electron and carbon density. The spectroscopic line-average ratio of hydrogen and helium densities is used to set the density of these species. Three ion species (H,He,C) and the electrons are treated kinetically, including collisions. Electron instability drive does enhance the growth rate significantly, but the most unstable modes have characteristics of ion temperature gradient modes in all cases. As the carbon density gradient is scanned between the measured value and zero, the quasilinear carbon flux is invariably inward when the carbon density profile is hollow, so turbulent transport due to the instabilities considered here does not explain the observed outward flux of impurities in impurity hole plasmas. The stiffness of the quasilinear ion heat flux is found to be 1.7–2.3, which is lower than several estimates in tokamaks.

In the Large Helical Device (LHD), non-rotating (NR) m/n = 1/1 mode has been observed in weak magnetic shear regime 1,2) , where the m and n is poloidal and toroidal mode number, respectively. When the magnetic shear is decreased by controlling external coils and/or driving plasma currents, the NR mode abruptly grow during a discharge and extends the flattening of pressure profiles.

The driving and damping mechanism of plasma flow is an important issue because flow shear has a significant impact on turbulence in a plasma, which determines the transport in the magnetized plasma. Here we report clear evidence of the flow damping due to stochastization of the magnetic field. Abrupt damping of the toroidal flow associated with a transition from a nested magnetic flux surface to a stochastic magnetic field is observed when the magnetic shear at the rational surface decreases to 0.5 in the large helical device. This flow damping and resulting profile flattening are much stronger than expected from the Rechester–Rosenbluth model. The toroidal flow shear shows a linear decay, while the ion temperature gradient shows an exponential decay. This observation suggests that the flow damping is due to the change in the non-diffusive term of momentum transport.

Energy confinement and heat transport of net-current-free NBI heated plasmas in the large helical device (LHD) are discussed with emphasis on density and power deposition profile dependences. Although the apparent density dependence of the energy confinement time has been demonstrated in a wide parameter range in LHD, the loss of this dependence has been observed in the high density regime under specific conditions. Broad heat deposition due to off-axis alignment and shallow penetration of neutral beams degrades the global energy confinement while the local heat transport maintains a clear temperature dependence, lying between Bohm and gyro-Bohm characteristics. The central heat deposition tends towards an intrinsic density dependence like τE∝(n̄e/P)0.6 from the state where density dependence is lost. The broadening of the temperature profile due to the broad heat deposition profile contrasts with the invariant property that has been observed widely as profile resilience or stiffness in tokamak experiments. The confinement improvement as a result of the inward shift of the magnetic axis is obvious in the core region, which emphasizes the improvement of transport because of the geometry being unfavourable for the central heating of NBI in this configuration. The edge pressure, clearly, does not depend on the magnetic axis position. Unlike a tokamak H-mode, the edge pressure is determined by transport and can be increased by increasing the heating power.

The mode slowing down mechanism of the locked-mode-like instability without a large magnetic island is investigated, based on the LHD experimental analysis. The mode frequency coincides with E × B rotation frequency at the resonant surface and the slowing down is caused by two processes. One is the resonant surface moving to the small E × B rotation frequency region and the other is the slowing down of the E × B rotation frequency near the resonant surface. Both processes are almost the same as those of the locked-mode-like instability with a large magnetic island. The results suggest that the slowing down occurs even though the precursor does not have a large magnetic island. However, when the external RMP is imposed, the mode frequency in the slowing down phase sometimes does not coincide with the E × B rotation frequency. Moreover, the mode amplitude during the slowing down phase increases with the decrease of the mode frequency both with and without the imposed external RMP, which suggests that the instability growth in the slowing down phase is more strongly related to the mode frequency than the E × B rotation frequency because the mode sometimes does not rotate with the E × B rotation.