Experimental investigations of quasi-coherent micro-instabilities in Ohmic plasmas

Abstract

The ITG and TEM instabilities with quasi-coherent spectra have been identified experimentally, by the newly developed far-forward collective scattering measurements in J-TEXT tokamak Ohmical plasmas. The ITG mode has characteristic frequencies in the range of 30-100kHz and wavenumber of k_\theta\rho_s<0.3. After the plasma density exceeds at critical value, the ITG mode shows a bifurcation behavior, featured by frequency decrease and amplitude enhancement. Meanwhile, the ion energy loss enhancement and confinement degradation are also observed. It gives the direct experimental evidence for ion thermal transport caused by ITG instability.