Negative edge plasma currents in the SINP tokamak

A tokamak plasma discharge having an increase in duration accompanied with enhanced runaway electron flux has been experimentally studied in this paper. The discharges have been obtained by controlling the applied vertical magnetic field (B_v^applB_{\rm{v}}^{\rm{appl}}) to below a critical value. Such discharges have been observed to have ‘negative edge plasma currents’, detected using an internal Rogowskii coil (IRC). We have tried to correlate the runaway behaviour with the negative edge plasma currents and have explained that these observations are a result of beam plasma instabilities.