Destabilization mechanism of edge-localized MHD mode by a toroidal rotation in tokamaks

Aiba, Nobuyuki; Furukawa, Masaru*; Hirota, Makoto; Tokuda, Shinji

In this paper, we investigate numerically the destabilizing effect of a toroidal rotation on the edge localized MHD mode, which induces the large amplitude edge localized mode (ELM). As the results of this analysis, we reveal that the toroidal rotation with shear can destabilize this MHD mode, and the destabilization is caused by the difference between the plasma rotation frequency and the frequency of the unstable mode, which mainly affects the pressure-driven component of the unstable mode. This destabilizing effect becomes more effective as the wave length of the mode becomes shorter, but such a MHD mode with short wave length is also stabilized by the sheared toroidal rotation due to the Doppler-shift at each flux surfaces. We clarify that the stability of the edge localized MHD mode, whose wave length is typically intermediate, is determined by the balance between these stabilizing and destabilizing effects.