Bounce Precession Fishbones in the National Spherical Tokamak Experiment

Bursting modes are observed on the National Spherical Torus Experiment [M. Ono et al., Nucl. Fusion 40 (2000) 557], which are identified as bounce-precession-frequency fishbone modes. They are predicted to be important in high-current, low-shear discharges with a significant population of trapped particles with a large mean-bounce angle, such as produced by near-tangential beam injection into a large aspect-ratio device. Such a distribution is often stable to the usual precession-resonance fishbone mode. These modes could be important in ignited plasmas, driven by the trapped-alpha-particle population