Suppression of Alfvén Modes on the National Spherical Torus Experiment Upgrade with Outboard Beam Injection.

Abstract

In this Letter we present data from experiments on the National Spherical Torus Experiment Upgrade, where it is shown for the first time that small amounts of high pitch-angle beam ions can strongly suppress the counterpropagating global Alfvén eigenmodes (GAE). GAE have been implicated in the redistribution of fast ions and modification of the electron power balance in previous experiments on NSTX. The ability to predict the stability of Alfvén modes, and developing methods to control them, is important for fusion reactors like the International Tokamak Experimental Reactor, which are heated by a large population of nonthermal, super-Alfvénic ions consisting of fusion generated α's and beam ions injected for current profile control. We present a qualitative interpretation of these observations using an analytic model of the Doppler-shifted ion-cyclotron resonance drive responsible for GAE instability which has an important dependence on k_{⊥}ρ_{L}. A quantitative analysis of this data with the hym stability code predicts both the frequencies and instability of the GAE prior to, and suppression of the GAE after the injection of high pitch-angle beam ions.