The stability of ideal and resistive ballooning modes in the presence of equilibrium flows

Ideal and resistive ballooning modes have been the topic of extensive study in view of their important role in constraining plasma β or in causing degradation in electron energy confinement time. Much of these works in the literature have been done for static equilibrium. Recently several experiments on ISX, PDX and currently on TFTR and JET have demonstrated the presence of toroidal and poloidal flows due to asymmetry in the neutral beam injection (NBI). Also equilibrium flows can arise through diffusive processes in tokamak plasmas. Such flows induced by external sources or dissipative processes affect the form and location of the magnetic surfaces and also modify the density and pressure profiles in the equilibrium. In this paper, we therefore examine the effect of mass flows on the evolution of high (m,n) ideal and resistive ballooning modes using the simplified MHD equations. (author) 2 refs