A systematic study of the electromagnetic effects on the toroidal ion temperature gradient mode is presented using the local and nonlocal theories with the full kinetic terms. For the nonlocal study, a numerical code is developed to solve the electromagnetic gyrokinetic equation in the ballooning space. The electromagnetic coupling to the shear Alfvén mode is shown to give a stabilization of the toroidal temperature gradient mode at almost the same plasma pressure as that at which the kinetically modified magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) ballooning mode becomes destabilized. The transitional β value is shown to be lower in the full kinetic description than in the fluid theory. Possible correlations of these stability results with experimental observations are discussed.
The electromagnetic effect on the toroidal electron temperature gradient mode is investigated using local kinetic and fluid theories. It is found that the electromagnetic effect on the toroidal mode differs from that for the slab mode. For the slab mode, the electromagnetic effect gives a strong stabilization, while for the toroidal mode there is a destabilization. In particular, the modes with perpendicular wavelength comparable to the electron skin depth are destabilized by the finite electron inertia. It is shown that this contrasting result for the toroidal mode occurs mainly because the stabilizing effect of the parallel transit drift is significantly reduced by the finite electromagnetic term.
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