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Updated: Oct 17, 2025

Magnetically Induced Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability
Published on: March 3, 2017
Theory of coupled resistive drift and resistive drift ballooning instabilities in fusion plasma
Umer Rehman1, Ahmad Ali2, Shakeel Mahmood1
1Department of Physics, Air University, E-09 Complex, Islamabad, 44000, Pakistan.
Abstract:
Drift wave instabilities (DWI) associated with the two-fluid dynamics seems to be responsible for anomalous transport in modern day tokamaks. Ballooning instabilities tend to exchange flux tubes of different pressure, resulting in convective transport. The micro-level turbulence (drift wave) is coupled with the macro-level (ballooning mode) dynamics in fusion experiments. The co-existence of DWI and drift ballooning instabilities (DBI) is discussed in this work using a four-field plasma model. The formulation preserves both the microscopic and macroscopic dynamics of plasma. To demonstrate the coupling, a new dispersion relation is derived to analyze stability of the coupled modes in a non-uniform magnetized plasma. Linear stability of coupled drift-ballooning and drift-acoustic modes have been explored. The two-fluid effect (micro-level influence) through diamagnetic drift frequency for electrons and curvature drift frequency on unstable modes are demonstrated.
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