Influence of toroidal rotation on nonlinear evolution of tearing mode in tokamak plasmas

Abstract

Abstract The nonlinear evolution of the tearing mode instability with toroidal rotation is investigated using a three-dimensional toroidal geometry magnetohydrodynamic code (M3D). It is found that toroidal rotation plays a significantly stable role in reducing the width of magnetic island, which is independent of the direction of toroidal rotation. Compared with the stabilizing effect in the linear phase, the stabilizing effect of toroidal rotation is much stronger in the nonlinear phase. The magnetic island is almost suppressed by large enough rotation, even though the linear growth rate is weakly reduced in the linear phase. It is observed that the flow shear has a stabilizing effect, which is significant when the rotation frequency is large. However, it is shown that the magnitude of rotation plays a dominant role in stabilizing the magnetic island when the rotation frequency is small. The Coriolis force, rather than the centrifugal force, is found to play a dominant role in stabilizing the tearing mode in the nonlinear phase. When m / n = 3 / 2 and m / n = 2 / 1 tearing modes exist simultaneously, the sheared toroidal rotation is shown to effectively suppress the overlap of magnetic islands and field stochasticity caused by the coupling of neighboring islands.