Ion temperature gradient instability

Anomalous ion thermal conductivity remains an open physics issue for the present generation of high temperature tokamaks. It is generally believed to be due to Ion Temperature Gradient Instability (eta sub i mode). However, it was difficult, if not impossible to identify this instability and study the anomalous transport due to it, directly. Therefore the production and identification of the mode is pursued in the simpler and experimentally convenient configuration of the Columbia Linear Machine (CLM). CLM is a steady state machine which already has all the appropriate parameters, except (eta sub i). This parameter is being increased to the appropriate value of the order of 1 by feathering a tungsten screen located between the plasma source and the experimental cell to flatten the density profile and appropriate redesign of heating antennas to steepen the ion temperature profile. Once the instability is produced and identified, a thorough study of the characteristics of the mode can be done via a wide range of variation of all the critical parameters: (eta sub i), parallel wavelength, etc.