Impact of plasma rotation on the linear physics of resistive wall modes in tokamaks

Rotation effects on the linear stability of the resistive wall mode (RWM) are investigated numerically based on the ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) model. One topic is impact of poloidal rotation in a toroidally rotating plasma. Since the difference between mode frequency and rotation frequency is important to change the MHD stability by rotation, modulation of the Doppler-shifted frequency by poloidal rotation can play an important role even when the poloidal rotation velocity is significantly lower than the toroidal one. In addition, when poloidal rotation is fixed, the absolute value of the Doppler-shifted frequency relies on the direction of toroidal rotation, and hence, linear MHD stability can depend on this rotation direction. Such a dependence is sometimes observed experimentally. The other topic is the re-destabilization of the RWM by toroidal rotation in a reversed shear tokamak. Several numerical results imply that a candidate of this re-destabilized mode is a stable MHD eigenmode, which becomes unstable due to coupling with the RWM when rotation frequency is similar to the frequency of this stable eigenmode in a static equilibrium.