Flux tubes confined in tokamaks are observed to erupt explosively in some plasma disruptions and edge localized modes. Similar eruptions occur in astrophysical plasmas, for example, in solar flares and magnetospheric substorms. A single unifying nonlinear evolution equation describing such behavior in both astrophysical and tokamak plasmas is deriv…
Gyrokinetic microstability analyses, with and without electromagnetic effects, are presented for a spherical tokamak plasma equilibrium closely resembling that from a high confinement mode ( H mode ) discharge in the mega-ampere spherical tokamak ( MAST ) [ A. Sykes et al. , Nucl. Fusion 41 , 1423 ( 2001 )] . Electrostatic ion temperature gradient …
