Short wavelength fluctuations may be a source of anomalous transport in toroidal plasmas. Early investigations concerned electron and ion modes that occur only at a particular radius and have a localised eigenfunction: such modes do not seem important for transport. Recently, Connor, Taylor and Wilson [1] described electron modes that occur at all …
An important conclusion of earlier work using the ballooning representation is that shear damping of plasma drift waves may be suppressed in a torus. This application of the formalism requires that the diamagnetic frequency have a maximum and implies that drift modes can exist only at this maximum. Here we show that there is a far more general clas…