Kinetic theory of toroidicity and ellipticity-induced Alfven eigenmodes

Toroidicity-induced Alfven eigenmodes (TAE) and ellipticity-induced Alfven eigenmodes (EAE) are currently of great interest because they may destroy the confinement of fast ions in a burning tokamak plasma. The present study focuses on kinetic effects, extending the non-perturbative kinetic analysis of the TAE to the EAE. One finds that the parameter which measures the kinetic character of the EAE is significantly smaller than it is for the TAE for elongated plasmas like DIII-D. The parameter is rather small for the lower mode numbers but attains values of order unity or larger for the higher mode numbers, since the parameter scales as the square of the mode number. Consequently, one expects the lower mode number EAE's to have a strongly magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) character, and to suffer only perturbative damping that depends linearly on the dissipative mechanisms. However, while the former is true, the latter is not necessarily the case. This work examines these kinetic T/EAE(KT/EAE) modes in further detail