Observation of magnetic field perturbations during sawtooth activity in tokamak plasmas

Abstract

Sawtooth activity is a prominent example of a global plasma instability which is observed in virtually all tokamak devices. Despite numerous experimental and theoretical investigations, the phenomenon is still barely understood. As far as experimental effort is concerned, much attention has been paid to soft x-ray emission from the plasma and to its analysis in terms of two-dimensional contour plots, because it is thought to reflect the shape and temporal behaviour of magnetic flux surfaces during a sawtooth cycle. Recently, more direct methods of detecting sawtooth-related changes in the magnetic field structure have become available and have added new facets to the general picture. In this paper, some observations made on the Jülich tokamak TEXTOR by means of a Faraday rotation diagnostic technique will be reported. First, in correlation with the sawtooth collapse a localized periodic perturbation of the magnetic field with principal mode numbers m = 1 and n = 0 has been detected which, in the presence of an m = n = 1 island, may give rise to magnetic field line stochastization and thereby contribute significantly to a rapid expulsion of electronic energy from the plasma core region. Second, the so-called precursor oscillations prior to a sawtooth crash have been investigated and estimates have been obtained for the growth rate and width of a magnetic island forming immediately before the collapse.