Analytical Theory of Drift Waves and Drift-Alfvén Waves in Tokamaks

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Abstract
The collisionless drift wave and drift-Alfvén wave instabilities in a sheared magnetic field are considered using the complex transformation technique of Antonsen. It is shown that no unstable bounded eigensolutions for the finite-β radial eigenmode equations exist. We also present a more general technique based on the wave-flux conservation and find, furthermore, that the convective amplification of drift waves in the electrostatic limit can be anomalously large, which could lead to enhanced transport in tokamaks.