Pressure driven tokamaks

''Pressure driven tokamaks'' are special tokamaks for which the rate of injection of energy and mass (e.g., by neutral beams) is so large that no drive for the toroidal current is needed. Examples of pressure driven tokamak equilibria are found numerically; for these examples, both the poloidal and the toroidal magnetic fields vanish in a region around the plasma center. Thus, the ratio between the plasma pressure and the magnetic field pressure is large, namely of order unity. Therefore, pressure driven tokamaks appear attractive for fusion reactors; it is, however, an open question whether there exist magnetohydrodynamically stable pressure driven equilibria. (C) 1996 American Institute of Physics.