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Updated: Dec 23, 2025

Magnetically Induced Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability
Published on: March 3, 2017
Spontaneous spin-up induced by turbulence-driven topological transition of orbits in a collisionless tokamak plasma
1Department of Engineering and Applied Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China. wangsj@ustc.edu.cn.
Abstract:
Spontaneous spin-up are widely observed in tokamak plasmas, which is crucially important for plasma confinement. A kinetic theory is proposed to show that a toroidal rotation of core plasma is induced by the topological transition of orbits driven by turbulent diffusion in a collisionless tokamak plasma. The theoretical prediction agrees well with the well-known Rice-scaling of intrinsic core plasma flow. This new theory predicts an intrinsic co-current core parallel flow of ~100 km/s in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.
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