Abrupt onset of tongue deformation and phase space response of ions in magnetically-confined plasmas

作者：Ida K; Kobayashi T; Itoh K; Yoshinuma M; Tokuzawa T; Akiyama T; Moon C; Tsuchiya H; Inagaki S; Itoh S I

来源：Scientific Reports, 2016, 6(1): 36217.

DOI：10.1038/srep36217

An abrupt onset of the new tongue-shaped deformation of magnetic surface in magnetized plasmas, which was conjectured in since the 1960s but has not been observed, is experimentally identified just before an abrupt onset of a large-scale collapse event. Two novel properties of the event are identified. First, the transition of symmetry of perturbation (rather than a growth of linearly unstable MHD modes) was found to be a key for the onset of abrupt collapse, i.e., the transition of symmetry gives a new route to the collapse from stable state. Second, as a phase-space response of ions, the distortion from Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of epithermal ions was observed for the first time.

• 出版日期2016-10-31