Coherent mode induced by supersonic molecular beam injection in EAST Ohmic plasmas

A coherent mode (CM) induced by the supersonic molecular beam injection (SMBI) was observed in Ohmic plasmas of EAST tokamak. The CM existed in the spectra of the electron temperature fluctuation and density fluctuation, but not in the spectrum of Mirnov fluctuation. The radial location of the CM was about 10 cm inside the separatrix (normalized minor radius rho similar to 0.75). In most cases, the CM has multiple discrete frequencies between 5 similar to 20 kHz with an interval of similar to 1 kHz. Occasionally, there is only one dominant frequency. The poloidal scale of the CM (poloidal wavenumber k(theta) similar to 0.4 cm(-1), poloidal mode number m similar to 20) is between that of typical ion turbulence and macroscopic magnetohydrodynamic activities. Statistical analysis results suggest that the onset of the CM requires a high temperature gradient and a relatively low density gradient. Furthermore, the transport analysis shows that the SMBI-caused perturbation propagates inward faster in plasmas with stronger CM, which implies that the CM might be correlated to a high local transport level. However, the impact of the CM on macroscopic plasma parameters including stored energy, energy confinement time, and SMBI-caused mean density fluctuation is too weak to be found in comparison with the random fluctuation and the measurement errors, which suggests that the CM does not have a clear influence on the global confinement.

Automated summary

A coherent mode (CM) induced by SMBI was observed in Ohmic plasmas of EAST tokamak, which existed in the fluctuation spectra of electron temperature and density but not in the Mirnov fluctuation spectrum. The CM had multiple discrete frequencies between 5 to 20 kHz, occasionally dominated by a single frequency. It was found to be correlated to a high local transport level but did not have a clear influence on global confinement.