Existence of weakly damped kinetic Alfvén eigenmodes in reversed shear tokamak plasmas

A kinetic theory of weakly damped Alfvén eigenmode solutions strongly interacting with the continuum is developed for tokamak plasmas with reversed magnetic shear. It is shown that finite Larmor radius (FLR) effects are required for global eigenmode solutions. FLR effects induce multiple kinetic subeigenmodes and collisionless radiative damping. The theory explains the existence of experimentally observed Alfvénic instabilities with frequencies sweeping down and reaching their minimum (bottom).