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Geodesic acoustic mode (GAM) is the finite frequency counterpart of zonal flow in toroidal plasmas, which could be excited by and regulate turbulence. This article reports a stationary eigenmode GAM at the inner side of the edge radial electric field contributing to an extreme high confinement plasma with $H_{98}\gt 1.3$ . Such GAM could be observed exclusively in the vicinity of the pedestal top, but not in the pedestal region itself, which represents a previously unreported phenomenon. The bicoherence analysis demonstrates a robust interaction between the GAM and quasi coherent mode (QCM). Statistical evidence indicates that GAMs with such characteristics display a proclivity for a large q _95 and low collisionality in all instances of H-mode accompanied by QCM. Based on the Gyro-kinetic simulation, the QCM is the low n trapped electron mode (TEM) and that the GAM is driven by TEM. Furthermore, the simulations show that the amplitude of GAM declines in conjunction with an increase in the collisionality, which is consistent with the experimental statistics. Additionally, the simulations demonstrate that the turbulent transport exhibits a corresponding decrease as GAM amplitude declines, implying that GAM and its interaction with the QCM would play an important role in the stability and confinement enhancement of such H-mode.

This paper reports the recent observation of a weakly coherent mode (WCM) within a conventional reflectometer on EAST and successfully determines its poloidal wavenumber range. During the transition from the L-mode to I-mode, the line-averaged density remains nearly unchanged while a significant change is observed in the electron cyclotron emission (ECE) signals at the boundary. The difference between the signals for the two channels at the edge increased, coinciding with the appearance of the WCM and a simultaneous rise in the boundary electron temperature. Further investigation unveiled the modulating role of edge temperature ring oscillation (ETRO) (Liu et al 2020 Nucl. Fusion 60 126016) on high-frequency density fluctuations. Statistical results unveil an inverse relationship between the centeral frequency of the WCM and q _95 . Simulation results provide additional insights, demonstrating that the simulated ‘WCM’ in the density fluctuations aligns with experimental data in terms of center frequency. Additionally, the radial distribution of the simulated ‘WCM’ closely corresponds to regions with the strongest electron temperature gradients. Finally, through a cross-correlation analysis of the simulated fluctuations, the following phase relationship for the wavenumber range of ‘WCM’ was observed: $\alpha_{\widetilde{T}_e} \gt \alpha_{\widetilde{n}_i}\sim\alpha_{\widetilde{\phi}} \gt \alpha_{\widetilde{T}_i}$ .

The improved energy confinement mode (I-mode) is widely considered as an important operation regime for ITER. I-mode implementation depends on the specified basic plasma parameters and certain operation conditions, which are discovered by statistical plasma characteristics from a large number of I-mode discharges on a tokamak. The extraction process of I-mode plasma characteristics is complicated, time-consuming, and limited to the sampling rate of the measured signals. Experimental observation of the I-mode is accompanied by the appearance of a weakly coherent mode (WCM). However, it takes much time to accurately scan and quantify WCM characteristics when analyzing many I-mode discharges. Recently, a neural network identification method was developed as an I-mode detector to traverse a whole database as a replacement for manual identification. Two fully connected neural network models were trained with the spectrum of propagation velocity of density perturbation from Doppler backward scattering and the electron density measured by a polarimeter-interferometer system with the experimental advanced superconducting tokamak I-mode database. An accuracy of 98.30% in identifying WCMs in I-mode discharges is achieved with the WCM classification model. In addition, the regime classification model was also utilized to successfully distinguish between the low confinement mode (L-mode), I-mode, and high confinement mode (H-mode) with 96.03% accuracy. Finally, ablation experiments were performed on the regime classifiers, showing that there is potential for further performance improvement with future use of RNN model.

By analyzing large quantities of discharges in the unfavorable ion drift direction, I-mode operation has been confirmed in the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak. During the L-mode to I-mode transition, the energy confinement is improvement substantially by the formation of a high-temperature edge pedestal, while the particle confinement remains almost identical to that in the L-mode. Similar with I-mode observations on other devices, the Er profiles obtained by the eight-channel Doppler backscattering system (DBS8) (Hu et al 2017 Rev. Sci. Instrum. 88 073504) show a deeper edge Er well in the I-mode than that in the L-mode. Additionally a weak coherent mode (WCM) with the frequency range of 40–150 kHz is observed at the edge plasma with the radial extent of about 2–3 cm. WCM could be observed in both density fluctuation and radial electric field fluctuation, and the bicoherence analyses showed significant couplings between WCM and high frequency turbulence, implying that the Er fluctuation and the caused flow shear from WCM should play an important role during I-mode operation. In addition, a low-frequency oscillation with a frequency range of 5–10 kHz is always accompanied with WCM, where the geodesic acoustic model intensity decreases or disappears. The evidence shows that the a low-frequency oscillation may be a novel kind of limited cycle oscillation but further investigation is needed to explain the new properties such as the harmonics and obvious magnetic perturbations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dependence of ELM frequency on heating power has been studied on the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST). It is found that the ELM frequency (fELM) generally increases with the power through separatrix (Psep), indicating type-I ELM in these plasmas. However, there are two data points, named ‘abnormal ELM’ in the present paper, which have much lower fELM than the ‘normal ELM’, while both types of ELM have similar ELM energy losses. The ‘abnormal ELM’ occurs at a phase with increased radiation power due to metal impurity influx events. The increased radiation power cannot explain the much lower fELM for ‘abnormal ELM’, since the reduction of Psep is weaker than proportional to the observed reduction of the ELM frequency. The ‘abnormal ELM’ feature can be attributed to the enhanced amplitude of a coherent mode in the pedestal region. Comparing the pedestal evolutions for the two types of ELM with similar separatrix power Psep, it is actually found that the more pronounced pedestal coherent mode in the plasma with ‘abnormal ELM’ leads to a slower pressure pedestal recovery during the inter-ELM phase. This experimental result implies that the physical mechanism for ‘abnormal ELM’ is that the more pronounced pedestal fluctuation induces larger outward transport, slows down the pedestal evolution and leads to longer inter-ELM phase, i.e. lower ELM frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turbulence in the pedestal region of the EAST tokamak has been observed and studied using reflectometry. In lower hybrid wave (LHW) or neutral beam injection (NBI) dominated heating plasma, a coherent mode (CM) was usually observed in the ELM-free phase just after the L-H transition. The CM rotated in the electron diamagnetic drift (EDD) direction in the laboratory frame with a poloidal wave number (kθ) of 0.5 cm−1–0.7 cm−1 and its frequency usually chirped from 80 – 100 kHz down to 40 – 50 kHz as the pedestal evolved. The appearance of this mode reduced the increasing rate of pedestal pressure, implying that the CM may have an effect on outward pedestal transport. This mode can exist every ten milliseconds and is finally replaced by broadband (BB) fluctuation in the later ELM-free phase. It was found that the appearance and disappearance of the CM was correlated to the pedestal pressure. In the inter-ELM phase, the pedestal turbulence is generally dominated by BB fluctuation with poloidal wave numbers from 0 to 3 cm−1 rotating in the EDD direction in the laboratory frame. Analysis shows that the pedestal pressure increasing rate dpe, ped/dt decreases with the amplitude of the BB fluctuation, implying that the BB fluctuation may play an important role in pedestal evolution. The preliminary observation on the fluctuation just inside the pedestal top is also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]