Spectral properties of the kinetic Alfven wave in cylindrical tokamak geometry

It is shown, for a tokamak-like cylindrical plasma and small poloidal and toroidal mode numbers, that the full gyrokinetic shear Alfven spectrum is discrete when k/sub parallel/not =0. Calculations of the global eigenmodes of the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) limit, and their first-order finite Larmor radius (FLR) corrections, are presented. First-order FLR theory is found to be a good approximation to full FLR theory, even for modes with high radial node number. In the presence of a positive density gradient, such as that which may occur with pellet fueling of the plasma, the existence of global MHD eigenmodes above the Alfven continuum is confirmed