Observation of SOL Current Correlated with MHD Activity in NBI-heated DIII-D Tokamak Discharges

This work investigates the potential roles played by the scrape-off-layer current (SOLC) in MHD activity of tokamak plasmas, including effects on stability. SOLCs are found during MHD activity that are: (1) slowly growing after a mode-locking-like event, (2) oscillating in the several kHz range and phase-locked with magnetic and electron temperature oscillations, (3) rapidly growing with a sub-ms time scale during a thermal collapse and a current quench, and (4) spiky in temporal behavior and correlated with spiky features in Da signals commonly identified with the edge localized mode (ELM). These SOLCs are found to be an integral part of the MHD activity, with a propensity to flow in a toroidally non-axisymmetric pattern and with magnitude potentially large enough to play a role in the MHD stability. Candidate mechanisms that can drive these SOLCs are identified: (a) toroidally non-axisymmetric thermoelectric potential, (b) electromotive force (EMF) from MHD activity, and (c) flux swing, both toroidal and poloidal, of the plasma column. An effect is found, stemming from the shear in the field line pitch angle, that mitigates the efficacy of a toroidally non-axisymmetric SOLC to generate a toroidally non-axisymmetric error field. Other potential magnetic consequences of the SOLC are identified: (i) its error field can introduce complications in feedback control schemes for stabilizing MHD activity and (ii) its toroidally non-axisymmetric field can be falsely identified as an axisymmetric field by the tokamak control logic and in equilibrium reconstruction. The radial profile of a SOLC observed during a quiescent discharge period is determined, and found to possess polarity reversals as a function of radial distance