Radial electric field and rotation of the ensemble of plasma particles in tokamak

The velocity of macroscopic rotation of an ensemble of charged particles in a tokamak in the presence of an electric field has been calculated in a collisionless approximation. It is shown that the velocity of toroidal rotation does not reduce to a local velocity of electric drift and has opposite directions on the inner and outer sides of the torus. This result is supplemented by an analysis of the trajectories of motion of individual particles in the ensemble, which shows that the passing and trapped particles of the ensemble acquire in the electric field, on the average, different toroidal velocities. For the trapped particles, this velocity is equal to that of electric drift in the poloidal magnetic field, while the velocity of passing particles is significantly different. It is shown that, although the electric-field-induced shift of the boundaries between trapped and passing particles in the phase space depends on the particle mass and charge and is, in the general case, asymmetric, this does not lead to current generation. © 2012 Pleiades Publishing, Ltd.