Abstract
The class of pressure-driven plasma instabilities known as ballooning modes may be responsible for such diverse phenomena as high-beta disruptions in tokamaks, solar flares and magnetospheric substorms. In this paper the theory of the spectrum of unstable eigenvalues of the linearized ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations of motion in non-axisymmetric toroidal equilibria is sketched, comparing and contrasting systems with open field lines and systems with toroidally confined field lines. The need to regularize ideal MHD to keep the wavenumber finite, and the relevance of quantum chaos theory to understand the structure of the spectrum, is pointed out.
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