Exploring a small sawtooth regime in Joint European Torus plasmas with counterinjected neutral beams

During a recent reversed toroidal field (B-T) campaign at the Joint European Torus (JET), experiments were performed to investigate the effect on sawteeth of neutral beam injection (NBI)-driven toroidal plasma rotation counter to the direction of the toroidal plasma current and B-T. A power scan at constant density has permitted analytical continuation, into the reversed B-T domain, of previous experiments with forward field and hence corotation. Earlier JET results were confirmed, indicating that counter-NBI results in sawtooth periods shorter than in the Ohmic regime. This study has demonstrated that, whereas with co-NBI the sawtooth period increases with power, with counter-NBI the sawtooth period initially decreases with power passing through a minimum at 4 MW. Clearly this trend also manifests itself in terms of the toroidal plasma rotation, for which a minimum is observed for counter-rotation frequency similar to 3 kHz. Sawteeth smaller than Ohmic sawteeth are found to be easier to obtain with perpendicular counter-NBI, for which heating penetrates deeper into the core. The sign and magnitude of the toroidal rotation, the penetration of heating to the electrons, and the peaking of the fast-ion pressure profile in the core may all play an important role in modifying the sawtooh period. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.