Effect of parallel flow on resonant layer responses in high beta plasmas

Abstract

Abstract Resonant layers in a tokamak respond to non-axisymmetric magnetic perturbations by amplifying the mode amplitude and balancing the plasma rotation through magnetic reconnection and force balance, respectively. This resonant response can be characterized by local layer parameters and especially by a single quantity in the linear regime, the so-called inner-layer Δ. The computation of Δ under two-fluid drift-MHD formalism has been progressed by reducing the order of the system in the phase space, where the shielding current is approximated as being only carried by electrons, a posteriori. In this study, we relax the approximation and compute Δ accounted for by the parallel flow associated with the ion shielding current. The posteriori is numerically verified in great agreement with the original SLAYER developed in a previous paper (J.-K. Park 2022 Phys. Plasmas 29 072506). Extending the resonant layer response theory to high β plasmas, our research findings answer two important questions: how the parallel flow influences the resonant layer response and why the parallel flow effect appears in high β plasmas. The complicated plasma compression in high β regime allows the parallel flow response to give rise to the ion shielding current, which not only shifts the zero-crossing condition of the ExB flow but also enhances the field penetration threshold. Technically, the Riccati matrix transformation method is adapted to handle the numerical stiffness due to the increased order of the system. The high fidelity of this numerical method makes use of further extension of the model to higher-order systems to take other physical phenomena into account. This work is envisaged to predict the resonant layer response under high β fusion reactor conditions.