Drift waves and magnetic field oscillations in cylindrical plasmas

Abstract

A general investigation of linear drift-wave phenomena in cylindrically bounded plasmas, immersed in a magnetic field without shear and curvature, is performed within the two-fluid hydrodynamical approximation, taking into account electron-temperature oscillations and inhomogeneous radial distributions of the undisturbed electron density and temperature. For plasmas in which the electron temperature strongly exceeds the ion temperature the problem is reduced to an ordinary complex second-order differential equation describing the radial distribution of the oscillating electric potential. It is shown that the presence of electron-temperature oscillations (which must always exist in order to satisfy electron-energy conservation) and of radial gradients in the undisturbed electron temperature (which must always exist owing to cooling of the plasma at the boundary) leads to an important modification of the theory of drift waves in cylindrical plasmas (with regard to their stability and the radial distribution of the oscillating quantities) compared with previous papers in which these phenomena were disregarded. A numerical program for solving the corresponding complex-eigenvalue problem has been derived that allows a realistic calculation of all the quantities pertaining to drift-wave phenomena. It has been applied, in particular, to the calculation of the radial distribution of the oscillating coherent magnetic fields accompanying the coherent drift waves. The numerical results prove to be in good agreement with experiments performed with a helium plasma.