Kinetic toroidal analysis of transport trends in TFTR plasmas

Low frequency drift-type microinstabilities driven by trapped-electron and ion temperature gradient dynamics continue to be among the more strongly supported candidates to account for the anomalous transport observed in tokamak plasmas. The possible relevance of these instabilities is addressed by applications of realistic kinetic stability calculations in toroidal geometry using parameters specific to TFTR confinement experiments of interest. With regard to examining the basic question of how sensitive transport might be to spatial gradient variations, representative L-mode cases have been analyzed by artificially varying the local density and temperature gradients for each species