Structure and damping of toroidal drift waves (and their implications for anomalous transport)

The conventional theory of high-n toroidal drift waves, based on the ballooning representation, indicates that shear-damping is generally reduced in a torus compared to its plane-slab value. It therefore describes the most unstable class of toroidal drift waves. However, modes of this type occur only i f the diamagnetic frequency ω*(r) has a maximum in r, and they affect only a small fraction, Ο(1/nl/2), of the plasma radius around this maximum. Consequently they may produce little anomalous transport. In the present work we show that, within the ballooning description, there is another class of toroidal drift waves with very different properties to the conventional ones. The new modes have greater shear-damping (closer to that in a plane-slab) than the conventional ones and so have a higher instability threshold. However, they occur for any plasma profile and at all radii, and they have larger radial extent. Consequently they may produce much greater anomalous transport than the possibly benign conventional modes. This suggests a picture of anomalous transport in which the plasma profile is determined by marginal stability, but marginal to the new class of modes not to the conventional ones. This might explain why marginally stable profiles calculated for drift waves with plane-slab damping sometimes agree well with the profiles in toroidal experiments. It is also consistent with the fact that experimental profiles may exceed conventional toroidal instability thresholds. The new modes may also be related to the tong radial structures which appear in some plasma simulations and in experiments