Suppression of Trapped Energetic Ions Driven Resistive Interchange Modes with Electron Cyclotron Heating in a Helical Plasma

Phys Rev Lett. 2017 Mar 24;118(12):125001. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.125001. Epub 2017 Mar 20.

Abstract

The resistive interchange mode destabilized by the resonant interaction with the trapped energetic ions is fully suppressed when the injected power of electron cyclotron heating exceeds a certain threshold. It is shown for the first time that the complete stabilization of the energetic-particle-driven mode without relaxing the energetic particle (EP) pressure gradient is possible by reducing the radial width of the eigenmodes δ_{w}, especially when δ_{w} narrows to a small enough value relative to the finite orbit width of EP.