Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 16, 2026

Magnetically Induced Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability
Published on: March 3, 2017
Mechanism of stabilization of ballooning modes by toroidal rotation shear in tokamaks
1Naka Fusion Research Establishment, Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, Naka, Ibaraki 311-0193, Japan. furukawa@ppl.k.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Abstract:
A ballooning perturbation in a toroidally rotating tokamak is expanded by square-integrable eigenfunctions of an eigenvalue problem associated with ballooning modes in a static plasma. Especially a weight function is chosen such that the eigenvalue problem has only the discrete spectrum. The eigenvalues evolve in time owing to toroidal rotation shear, resulting in a countably infinite number of crossings among them. The crossings cause energy transfer from an unstable mode to the infinite number of stable modes; such transfer works as the stabilization mechanism of the ballooning mode.
Related Concept Videos
Torsional Pendulum
As long as the rigid body's angular displacement is small, its oscillation can be modeled as a linear angular oscillation. The amplitude of the oscillation is an angle. The role of mass is played by the...
Atomic Nuclei: Nuclear Relaxation Processes
Torsion of Noncircular Members
Thin-Walled Hollow Shafts
Transformation of Plane Stress
Stability of structures

