Electron cyclotron heating and current drive for maintaining minimum q in negative central shear discharges

Toroidal plasmas created with negative magnetic shear in the core region offer advantages in terms of MHD stability properties. These plasmas, transiently created in several tokamaks, have exhibited high-performance as measured by normalized stored energy and neutron production rates. A critical issue with extending the duration of these plasmas is the need to maintain the off-axis-peaked current distribution required to support the minimum in the safety factor q at large radii. We present equilibrium and transport simulations that explore the use of electron cyclotron heating and current drive to maintain this negative shear configuration. Using parameters consistent with DIII-D tokamak operation (Strait E et al 1995 Phys. Rev. Lett. 75 4421, Rice B W et al 1996 Nucl. Fusion 36 1271), we find that with sufficiently high injected power, it is possible to achieve steady-state conditions employing well aligned electron cyclotron and bootstrap current drive in fully non-inductively current-driven configurations.