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Updated: Jul 1, 2025

Magnetically Induced Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability
Published on: March 3, 2017
Saturation of Fishbone Instability by Self-Generated Zonal Flows in Tokamak Plasmas
G Brochard1,2, C Liu3, X Wei2
1ITER organisation, Route de Vinon-sur-Verdon, CS 90 046 13067 St., Paul Lez Durance, France.
Abstract:
Gyrokinetic simulations of the fishbone instability in DIII-D tokamak plasmas find that self-generated zonal flows can dominate the nonlinear saturation by preventing coherent structures from persisting or drifting in the energetic particle phase space when the mode frequency down-chirps. Results from the simulation with zonal flows agree quantitatively, for the first time, with experimental measurements of the fishbone saturation amplitude and energetic particle transport. Moreover, the fishbone-induced zonal flows are likely responsible for the formation of an internal transport barrier that was observed after fishbone bursts in this DIII-D experiment. Finally, gyrokinetic simulations of a related ITER baseline scenario show that the fishbone induces insignificant energetic particle redistribution and may enable high performance scenarios in ITER burning plasma experiments.
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