ON RESONANCE-ABSORPTION AND CONTINUUM DAMPING

The absorption of power is studied with fluid and gyrokinetic plasma m odels, when Alfven resonances provide for a weak damping in a partiall y standing wave field. Examples chosen in slab and toroidal geometry s how that the fluid predictions based on resonance absorption are gener ally very different from the Landau damping of mode-converted slow wav es. They, in particular, suggest that the continuum damping of toroida l Alfven eigenmodes (TAE) and the power deposition profiles obtained i n the ion-cyclotron range of frequencies (ICRF) using fluid plasma mod els can be very misleading. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics. [S 1070-664X(98)01111-2].