No abstract

In magnetic configurations with two or three q=1 (with q being the safety factor) resonant surfaces in a tokamak plasma, resistive magnetohydrodynamic modes with poloidal mode numbers m much larger than 1 are found to be linearly unstable. It is found that these high-m double or triple tearing modes significantly enhance through nonlinear interactions the growth of the m=1 mode. This may account for the sudden onset of the internal resistive kink, i.e., the fast sawtooth trigger. Based on the subsequent reconnection dynamics that can proceed without formation of the m=1 islands, it is proposed that high-m triple tearing modes are a possible mechanism for precursor-free partial collapses during sawtooth oscillations.

We investigate the dynamics of many-body long-range interacting systems, taking the Hamiltonian mean-field model as a case study. We show that regular trajectories, associated with invariant tori of the single-particle dynamics, prevail. The presence of such tori provides a dynamical interpretation of the emergence of long-lasting out-of-equilibrium regimes observed generically in long-range systems. This is alternative to a previous statistical mechanics approach to such phenomena which was based on a maximum entropy principle. Previously detected out-of-equilibrium phase transitions are also reinterpreted within this framework.