Gyrokinetic theory for arbitrary wavelength electromagnetic modes in tokamaks

A linear gyrokinetic system for arbitrary wavelength electromagnetic modes is developed. A wide range of modes in inhomogeneous plasmas, such as the internal kink modes, the toroidal Alfven eigenmode (TAE) modes, and the drift modes, can be recovered from this system. The inclusion of most of the interesting physical factors into a single framework enables one to look at many familiar modes simultaneously, and thus to study the modifications of and the interactions between them in a systematic way. Especially, it is possible to investigate self-consistently the kinetic magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) phenomena entirely from the kinetic side. Phase space Lagrangian Lie perturbation methods and a newly developed computer algebra package for vector analysis in general coordinate system are utilized in the analytical derivation. In tokamak geometries, a two-dimensional finite element code has been developed and tested. In this paper, the basic theoretical formalism and some of the preliminary results are presented. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics.