Spectral characteristics of zonal flows in the edge plasmas of the HT-7 tokamak

The spectral characteristics of zonal flows, including both the geodesic acoustic mode (GAM) and the zero/low frequency zonal flow (LFZF), are investigated by applying the two-point correlation technique and bispectral analysis to the floating potential fluctuations measured by several Langmuir probe arrays on the HT-7 tokamak. The three-dimensional wavenumber and frequency spectra for the two modes have been estimated. The radial wavenumber spectra show that the LFZF packages propagate both outward and inward while the GAM packages propagate outward mostly. Nonlinear couplings betweeen zonal flows and ambient turbulence are observed in the biphase while the bicoherence at the GAM frequency is much larger than that at the LFZF frequency. A kind of mode with frequencies higher than that of GAM, which may also be generated from the ambient turbulence in a similar way as the zonal flows, is reported.