High-β disruption in tokamaks

Three dimensional MHD simulations of high-β plasmas show that toroidally localized high-n ballooning modes can be driven unstable by the local pressure steepening which arises from the evolution of low-n modes. Nonlinearly, the high-n mode becomes even more localized and produces a strong local pressure bulge which destroys the flux surfaces resulting in a thermal quench. The flux surfaces then recover temporarily but now contain large magnetic islands. This scenario is supported by experimental data