Formation and stability of impurity "snakes" in tokamak plasmas

New observations of the formation and dynamics of long-lived impurity-induced helical "snake" modes in tokamak plasmas have recently been carried out on Alcator C-Mod. The snakes form as an asymmetry in the impurity ion density that undergoes a seamless transition from a small helically displaced density to a large crescent-shaped helical structure inside q<1, with a regularly sawtoothing core. The observations show that the conditions for the formation and persistence of a snake cannot be explained by plasma pressure alone. Instead, many features arise naturally from nonlinear interactions in a 3D MHD model that separately evolves the plasma density and temperature.