Global gyro-kinetic study of magnetic shaping effects on linear trapped electron mode instability in normal/reversed magnetic shear plasmas

Abstract

Abstract A linear δf version of the gyro-kinetic Vlasov code GKNET (Gyro-Kinetic Numerical Experiment of Tokamak) is extended to the global cylindrical coordinates (R, φ, Z) and includes the kinetic electron response, to study the shaping effect on linear drift-wave instabilities in Tokamak plasmas. Cross-verifications are performed between three GKNET versions that use different electron models, i.e. the adiabatic electron model, hybrid electron model (only trapped electrons are calculated kinetically) and full-kinetic electron model (all electrons are calculated kinetically). A destabilizing effect of non-adiabatic passing electrons is observed in the full-kinetic case for the ion temperature gradient (ITG) mode in the short wavelength region and the trapped electron mode (TEM). The ion-to-electron mass ratio and the electron–electron collisionality have weak impacts on the destabilization of ITG/TEM. Utilizing magnetohydrodynamic equilibria designed with normal and reversed magnetic shear (NS and RS), the characteristics of linear TEMs and the corresponding impact of plasma shaping are studied based on the GKNET code with full-kinetic electrons. Due to the change in temperature/density gradient and magnetic shear either measured locally in the low field side (LFS) or averaged over the flux surface, plasma shaping shows different impacts on linear TEMs in NS and RS configurations. For the elongation κ, the increase in κ always stabilizes linear TEMs due to the reduction in the effective profile gradient over the flux surface. For the triangularity δ, in the NS case, the change in δ shows weak dependence on TEM linear growth rates due to the balance between variations of profile gradients and magnetic shear in the LFS. In the RS case, local magnetic shear in the peak gradient region is nearly zero. Thus, the variation in local profile gradient plays a dominant role on the linear growth in a plasma shaping scan. Consequently, the negative triangularity (δ < 0) has a destabilizing effect on the linear TEMs in the RS configuration mainly due to the upshift in local profile gradient in the LFS.