Magnetohydrodynamic mechanism for pedestal formation.

Time-dependent two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations are carried out for tokamak plasmas with edge poloidal flow. Differently from conventional equilibrium theory, a density pedestal all around the edge is obtained when the poloidal velocity exceeds the poloidal sound speed. The outboard pedestal is induced by the transonic discontinuity, the inboard one by mass redistribution. The density pedestal follows the formation of a highly sheared flow at the transonic surface. These results may be relevant to the L-H transition and pedestal formation in high performance tokamak plasmas.