This work reports the first comprehensive simulations of ion cyclotron resonance heating (ICRH) driven tokamak plasmas on the slowing-down timescale using the kinetic-MHD hybrid code MEGA, where shear Alfvén wave induced minority ion transport is self-consistently included during the high-energy tail formation. Bursting toroidal Alfvén eigenmodes (TAEs) are observed in both multi-n and single-n simulations of plasmas with a relatively low magnetic field () and an ion-cyclotron-range-of-frequency (ICRF) resonance layer located at the magnetic axis or on the inboard side, while outboard heating always leads to non-bursting TAEs, where is the toroidal mode number. During bursting events, a series of discrete TAEs with distinct frequencies emerges for each toroidal harmonic, with spatial overlap between adjacent modes. In contrast, in non-bursting cases, harmonics with the same toroidal mode number but centered at different radial locations form a single broad structure with nearly identical frequencies. The results further show that, in the bursting case, minority particles remain far from the radio-frequency (RF) resonance layer, whereas in the non-bursting case they stay close to it and experience strong ICRF-driven velocity-space diffusion. This indicates that ICRF-driven velocity-space diffusion can help suppress bursting TAEs and sustain higher energetic particle beta, highlighting the sensitivity of Alfvén eigenmode (AE) dynamics to the ICRF resonance location, which may be utilized for future AE control strategies.
Magnetohydrodynamic-kinetic hybrid simulation of Alfvén instabilities in ICRH experiments on EAST