Bursting toroidal Alfvén eigenmodes in KSTAR plasmas

We report on observations of bursty mode activity during early neutral beam heating in KSTAR plasmas, before current flat top while the q profile is still evolving. The magnitude of the activity increases with early beam heating, and reduces with the addition of resonant magnetic perturbation magnetic field coils. A mode analysis yields a toroidal mode number of n = 2. The mode is observed to be downward chirping in frequency, and exists for the duration of the slowing-down of the beam. Motional Stark effect constrained equilibrium reconstructions are available at adjacent time slices: we have rescaled the total current to the measured value to obtain the q profile during the mode activity. From this we have computed the mode spectrum and identified a number of candidate gap modes. Wave-particle simulations with plausible distribution functions are computed, which demonstrate that the lowest frequency mode satisfies the condition for wave drive omega(*)/omega > 1, where omega(*) is the fast ion diamagnetic drift frequency. An interesting finding is the change from exponential growth of the mode above n(f) /n(i0) approximate to 0.6, whereby the mode continues to nonlinearly grow at a reduced rate over a period of 100 wave periods up to final saturated amplitude. We believe that this may be because the two spatial resonances at s = 0.4 and s = 0.8 overlap for sufficiently high fast ion density, and so the phase-space volume and fast ion density available to drive the mode increases.