Linear and nonlinear excitation of TAE modes by external electromagnetic perturbations using ORB5

Abstract

Abstract The excitation of toroidicity-induced Alfvén eigenmodes (TAEs) using prescribed external electromagnetic perturbations (hereafter ‘antenna’) acting on a confined toroidal plasma, as well as its nonlinear couplings to other modes in the system, is studied. The antenna is described by an electrostatic potential resembling the target TAE mode structure along with its corresponding parallel electromagnetic potential computed from Ohm’s law. Numerically stable long-time linear simulations are achieved by integrating the antenna within the framework of a mixed representation and pullback scheme (Mishchenko et al 2019 Comput. Phys. Commun. 238 194). By decomposing the plasma electromagnetic potential into symplectic and Hamiltonian parts and using Ohm’s law, the destabilizing contribution of the potential gradient parallel to the magnetic field is cancelled in the equations of motion. Besides evaluating the frequencies and the growth/damping rates of excited modes compared to referenced TAEs, we study the interaction of antenna-driven modes with fast particles and indicate their margins of instability. Furthermore, we show the first nonlinear simulations in the presence of a TAE-like antenna exciting other TAE modes, as well as global Alfvén eigenmodes with different toroidal wave numbers from that of the antenna.