Fast seeding of NTMs by sawtooth crashes in TCV and their preemption using ECRH

Many tokamaks have observed that sawteeth of sufficient duration may trigger neoclassical tearing modes (NTMs) that lead to plasma performance degradation. In this paper, TCV's ability to accurately control the period of individual sawteeth is exploited, using localized electron cyclotron resonance heating and current drive (ECRH and ECCD), to trigger NTMs under controlled conditions, providing an excellent environment for the study of the seeding of NTMs by sawtooth crashes. The TCV experiments show evidence of a fast formation of seed islands with poloidal/toroidal mode numbers m/n = 3/2 and 2/1 within a few tens of microseconds following the sawtooth crash. Crashes of sawteeth with a longer period duration are observed to generate larger seed islands but also increase the plasma stability to conventional tearing modes. While these two effects compete, the NTM stability is found to decrease with increasing sawtooth period. The seed island size can be reduced and, thereby, the NTM stability improved, by increasing the value of the safety factor q(95). Alternatively, NTM stability can be increased by application of preemptive ECRH at the resonant surface of the NTM. Preemptive ECRH is found to enlarge the plasma operational domain by improving the conventional tearing stability and by reducing the coupling between the driving (m/n = 1/1 or 2/2) and the driven modes (m/n = 2/1 or 3/2), resulting in smaller sawtooth generated seed islands. The efficiency of preemptive ECRH increases when sufficient ECRH power is applied in a short time interval prior to the sawtooth crash.