Magnetohydrodynamic instability excited by interplay between a resistive wall mode and stable ideal magnetohydrodynamic modes in rotating tokamak plasmas

In a rotating toroidal plasma surrounded by a resistive wall, it is shown that linear magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities can be excited by interplay between the resistive wall mode (RWM) and stable ideal MHD modes, where the RWM can couple with not only a stable external kink mode but also various stable Alfven eigenmodes that abound in a toroidal plasma. The RWM growth rate is shown to peak repeatedly as the rotation frequency reaches specific values for which the frequencies of the ideal MHD modes are Doppler-shifted to the small RWM frequency. Such destabilization can be observed even when the RWM in a static plasma is stable. A dispersion relation clarifies that the unstable mode changes from the RWM to the ideal MHD mode destabilized by wall resistivity when the rotation frequency passes through these specific values. The unstable mode is excited at these rotation frequencies even though plasma rotation also tends to stabilize the RWM from the combination of the continuum damping and the ion Landau damping. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.