High-n ballooning instabilities in toroidally rotating tokamaks

High-n ballooning instabilities are studied with an initial-value code for toroidally rotating tokamaks, where n is a toroidal mode number. The effects of toroidal rotation are classified into two parts: (i) increase of effective pressure gradient due to the centrifugal force of the toroidal flow, and (ii) averaging of local magnetic equilibrium configuration over a period of poloidal angle in the case of finite flow-velocity shear. With the increase of effective pressure gradient in the rigid-rotation case, the growth rate of ballooning mode increases in the low-pressure regime as the toroidal flow velocity is increased, whereas it decreases in the high-pressure regime. The flow-velocity shear generally reduces the growth rate of the high-n ballooning mode by the averaging of the local equilibrium magnetic configuration. However, it is found that the ballooning mode becomes unstable by increasing the flow-velocity shear in a low-aspect-ratio tokamak. This is understood by the change of the local magnetic configuration, and by the changes of both the mode structure and the potential function in the ballooning space. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.