Abstract The evolution of a local helical perturbation and its stability property for arbitrary magnetic shear configurations are investigated for the case of in cylindrical geometry. An analytic stability criterion has been obtained which predicts that a strong magnetic shear will enhance the instability in the positive shear region but enhance the stability in the negative shear region. The perturbations with the poloidal and toroidal perturbation mode numbers m/n=1/1 is most unstable due to the stabilizing terms increasing with m. For m/n=1/1 local perturbations in the conventional positive magnetic shear (PMS) configurations, a larger $q_{\rm min}$ exhibits a weaker shear in the core and is favourable to the stability, while in the reversed magnetic shear (RMS) configurations, a larger $q_0$ corresponds to a stronger positive shear in the middle region, which enhances the instability. No instabilities are found for m≥2 local perturbations. The stability for RMS configuration is not better than that for PMS configuration.
Received: 15 March 2004
Revised: 24 December 2003
Accepted manuscript online:
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