A neoclassical validation of balanced and unbalanced rotations on EAST H-mode discharges

Predicting residual stress (RS) contribution to intrinsic rotation is one of the major challenges in the study of momentum transport in tokamaks. One efficient experimental means of quantifying RS torque magnitude is to generate radially-flat and near-zero rotation profiles, termed ‘balanced rotations’ in this work, using counter-I_p Neutral Beam Injections (NBIs) to effectively cancel the torques from co-I_p NBIs. One remaining question, however, is on whether or not the attained velocity profile is well zeroed and flat enough so that the predicted RS torques based on perfect balance assumption can be used for further studies such as fitting of diffusive and convective coefficients to match with experiments. This article presents a neoclassical means of validating the attained balanced and unbalanced rotations at EAST to consequently validate the predicted RS torque profiles, using TRANSP/NUBEAM and a recently-developed neoclassical rotation/transport code TransROTA (Bae et al 2024 Comput. Phys. Commun. 296 108992). Both balanced and unbalanced EAST H-mode discharges are analyzed to find that the suggested neoclassical validation methodology successfully validates attained balanced rotations. It also finds that neoclassical gyroviscous (NGV) torque serves as the balance-breaking mechanism for axisymmetric plasmas and the balance-breakings start from the core and propagate towards the edge. This work also suggests the possibility of using the neoclassical methodology to find locally-balanced rotations at an elevated velocity range near ∼20 km s⁻¹, which implies possible scaling of RS torques up to a certain elevated velocity range.