Suppression of the neoclassical tearing modes in tokamaks under anomalous transverse transport conditions when the magnetic well effect predominates over the bootstrap drive

A study is made of the suppression of neoclassical tearing modes in tokamaks under anomalous transverse transport conditions when the magnetic well effect predominates over the bootstrap drive. It is stressed that the corresponding effect, which is called the compound suppression effect, depends strongly on the profiles of the electron and ion temperature perturbations. Account is taken of the fact that the temperature profile can be established as a result of the competition between anomalous transverse heat transport, on the one hand, and longitudinal collisional heat transport, longitudinal heat convection, longitudinal inertial transport, and transport due to the rotation of magnetic islands, on the other hand. The role of geodesic effects is discussed. The cases of competition just mentioned are described by the model sets of reduced transport equations, which are called, respectively, collisional, convective, inertial, and rotational plasmophysical models. The magnetic well is calculated with allowance for geodesic effects. It is shown that, for strong anomalous heat transport conditions, the contribution of the magnetic well to the generalized Rutherford equation for the island width W is independent of W not only in the collisional model (which has been investigated earlier) but also in the convective and inertial models and depends very weakly (logarithmically) on W in the rotational model. It is this weak dependence that gives rise to the compound effect, which is the subject of the present study. A criterion for the stabilization of neoclassical tearing modes by the compound effect at an arbitrary level of the transverse heat transport by electrons and ions is derived and is analyzed for two cases: when the electron heat transport and ion heat transport are both strong, and when the electron heat transport is strong and the ion heat transport is weak.