Collisionless microtearing modes in standard tokamak configurations

Microtearing Modes (MTM) are electromagnetic microinstabilities occurring in magnetically confined fusion plasmas driven by parallel electron current and collisions in the presence of electron temperature gradient. MTMs were first predicted to occur in such plasmas in early 70s. Collisional MTMs have recently gathered attention in Spherical Tokamak configurations and RFPs. Very recently collisional MTMs have been reported in configuration relevant to standard tokamak, namely ASDEX-U. Perhaps for the first time, we show the existence of MTMs in purely collisionless limit and in large aspect ratio tokamak configurations using fully gyrokinetic full radius linear calculations. The physics of both electron scale as well as minor radius scale are resolved in the studies. Results of the studies, such as the 2-D structure of the mode and the dependence of growth rates on plasma pressure, perpendicular (to B₀) wavelength spectrum and the effect of Landau damping and magnetic drift resonance will be presented. A comparison with another electromagnetic mode, namely Kinetic Ballooning Mode, which is driven by ion temperature gradient will also be shown. (author)