STABILITY ANALYSIS OF TOROIDICITY-INDUCED ALFVEN EIGENMODES IN TFTR DEUTERIUM-TRITIUM EXPERIMENTS

The toroidicity-induced Alfven eigenmodes (TAE) are found to be stable in the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) deuterium-tritium plasmas. The dominant stabilizing mechanisms are beam ion Landau damping and radiative damping. A core localized TAE mode is shown to exist near the center of the plasma at small magnetic shear and finite plasma beta, which can be destabilized by energetic alpha particles in future TFTR DT experiments. With additional instability drive from fast minority ions powered by ion cyclotron radio frequency, both the global and core localized TAE modes can be readily destabilized.