Thermal ion kinetic effect and Landau damping in fishbone modes

In this work we extend the kinetic-MHD simulation approach for macroscopic instabilities in plasmas to include the kinetic effects of both thermal ions and energetic ions. The new coupling scheme includes synchronization of density and parallel velocity between thermal ions and MHD, in addition to pressure coupling, to ensure the quasineutrality condition and avoid numerical errors. The new approach has been implemented in the kinetic-MHD code M3D-C1-K, and was used to study the thermal ion kinetic effects and Landau damping in fishbone modes in both DIII-D and NSTX. It is found that the thermal ion kinetic effects can cause an increase of the frequencies of the non-resonant n = 1 fishbone modes driven by energetic particles for qmin > 1, and Landau damping can provide signficant stabilization effects. A nonlinear simulation for n = 1 fishbone mode in NSTX is also performed, and the perturbation on magnetic flux surfaces and the transport of energetic particles are calculated.