The effects of sheared toroidal rotation on stability limits in tokamak plasmas

Sheared toroidal rotation is found to increase the ideal external kink stability limit, thought to be the ultimate performance limit in fusion tokamaks. However, at rotation speeds approaching a significant fraction of the Alfvén speed, the toroidal rotation shear drives a Kelvin–Helmholtz-like global plasma instability. Optimizing the rotation profile to maximize the pressure before encountering external kink modes, but simultaneously avoiding flow-driven instabilities, can lead to a window of stability that might be attractive for operating future high-performance fusion devices such as a spherical tokamak component test facility.