2026/07/27 by Liwen Hu, Wei Chen, Peiwan Shi +18
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Fusion materials and technologies #Laser-Plasma Interactions and Diagnostics #Magnetic confinement fusion research
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1361-6587/ae90eb
openalex publication_date 2026/07/27 · openalex created_date 2026/07/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Abstract The density limit is a mysterious barrier to magnetic confinement nuclear fusion, and is still an unresolved issue. In this paper, we will present the experimental results of the density limit and core-localized kinetic MHD instabilities on HL-2A. Firstly, the high density shots with ne/ne G > 1 have been achieved by the conventional gas-puff fuelling method in Ohmic heating plasmas, and the corresponding duration time is close to t ∼ 500 ms (∼ 30τ E ), where τ E is the global energy confinement time. Secondly, it is found for the first time that there are kinetic MHD instabilities in the core plasmas while ne/ne G ∼ 1. The analysis suggests that the core-localized MHD activities belong to kinetic ballooning modes (KBM), and firstly it is found on experiment that they trigger the minor or major disruption of bulk plasmas while the density profile is peaked. These new findings are of great importance to figure out and understand the origin of the density limit.