Close coupling of the peeling ballooning and external kink modes in high poloidal-beta discharges with strong shape and large pedestal width

In plasmas with strong shape and large pedestal width, like DIII-D high poloidal-beta discharges, the eigenvalue spectrum of the peeling ballooning mode (PBM) is shown to shift to the very low-n regime near one, where n is the toroidal mode number. This peeling-type eigenvalue spectrum has a further shift to n = 1, thus being smoothly connected to the n = 1 external kink mode (EKM), as the normalized beta (beta(N)) increases. Once this connection occurs, the mode takes a mixture form of the PBM and EKM with its mode structure varying from the PBM-like to the EKM-like one as bN increases. The mode stability also becomes sensitive to both the local pedestal gradient and global bN, thus allowing an anti-correlation between the two driving forces. These results appear to provide a qualitative explanation of the two unexpected features observed in the DIII-D high poloidal-beta discharges, that is, the dominance of the n = 1 mode in the edge-localized-modes and the negative correlation between the pedestal height and the internal transport barrier strength. Published under an exclusive license by AIP Publishing.