Spontaneous excitation of geodesic acoustic mode by toroidal Alfvén eigenmodes

Spontaneous nonlinear excitation of geodesic acoustic mode (GAM) by toroidal Alfvén eigenmodes (TAE) is studied within the framework of gyrokinetic theory. The dispersion relation for the parametric decays of a pump TAE mode into a TAE lower sideband and a GAM is derived. It is shown that, in the ideal MHD first stability region, the condition for spontaneous excitation of GAM by TAEs is ω2 0 > V2 A/(4q2R2 0), in which, ω0 is the pump TAE real frequency, V A is the Alfvén speed, q is the safety factor and R0 is the torus major radius. The corresponding threshold condition is also derived and suggests the decay process as an effective saturation mechanism for TAE. © Copyright EPLA, 2013.