Beam-driven chirping instability in DIII-D

During neutral-beam injection into the DIII-D tokamak, instabilities with frequencies that 'whistle' down a factor of two in a single 2 ms burst are observed between 50 and 200 kHz. The instabilities have toroidal mode numbers n=1-8 and cause the loss of beam ions from the plasma. In contrast to the usual Alfven modes, which are fluid modes of the background plasma, these instabilities seem to be beam modes that are nearly stationary in the plasma frame.