Rotation of Tokamak Plasmas by Alfvén Waves

Abstract

Externally excited Alfven waves can generate the poloidal and toroidal rotation in the collisional (edge) and core (weakly collisional) tokamak plasma. The necessary value of these velocities to achieve the L-H transition, can be obtained by manipulating the value of an absorbed power. This rotation linearly depends on dissipated power, decreases in banana regimes and did not depend on toroidal magnetic field. In the plasma layer where the RF power is absorbed, the radial electric field also appears. There is the very satisfactory agreement between our theory and experimental results obtained on Phaedrus-T tokamak. The methods developed in this paper can be applied to other tokamaks with another kind of waves, which can be used to operate the plasma dynamics taking into account the appropriate dispersion relation for that type of waves.