Collision effects on high-n ballooning modes with a full Lorentz collision operator

The dispersion relation for high-n ballooning modes is obtained from the customary drift gyro-kinetic equation employing the energy-dependent Lorenz collision operator. There are significant differences between our results and those with the Krook collision operator. The present results show that collision seems to have much weaker stabilizing effects, if any, on the high-n ballooning modes than those with the Krook collision operator when the collisionality, υ*e, is smaller than a critical value. However, contrary to the phenomenon, the collision shows strong stabilizing effects on the ballooning mode once the collisionality exceeds a critical value. These differences are supposed to arise from boundary layer behaviour which refers to the electron perturbation at the boundary between trapped and passing electrons in velocity space, but the physical process cannot be described by non-conserving Krook collision operators. This destabilizing mechanism of boundary layer behaviour is discussed in this paper. In addition, the critical value shows a considerably strong dependence on ηe (ηe ≡ d ln Te/d ln Ne).