Stability analysis of plasma waves driven by runaway electrons in tokamak hot plasmas

Abstract

Abstract The local stability analysis of plasma waves driven by runaway electrons (REs) has been performed considering hot plasma Maxwellian background, with electron and ion temperatures of the order of 1 keV. It is shown that hot plasma waves, namely electron plasma waves (EPWs) and ion Bernstein waves (IBWs) can be driven unstable by RE at their coalescence frequency via Cherenkov resonance by RE with energy distribution peaked at about 8 MeV. A skew-normal distribution is used as a model of the RE energy distribution. The EPW and IBW couples of waves occur between any successive ion-cyclotron harmonics frequencies nf ci, above the lower hybrid resonance. At their confluence, the perpendicular group velocity vanishes and significant RF emissions are expected. The frequency gap between two successive confluences is ∼f ci. Groups of RF line emissions, separated by almost constant frequency gap ∼f ci/2 are detected during various quiescent runaway plasma discharges in the FTU tokamak. The analysis of a specific discharge suggests that the frequencies of the line emissions observed and the frequencies occurring at the EPW-IBW confluences are in reasonable agreement. A possible explanation of the line emissions with ∼f ci/2 gap in terms of nonlinear mode coupling is proposed.