Ballooning instabilities in tokamaks with sheared toroidal flows

The stability of ballooning modes in the presence of sheared toroidal flows is investigated. The eigenmodes are shown to be related by a Fourier transformation to the nonexponentially growing Floquet solutions found by Cooper [Plasma Phys. Controlled Fusion 30, 1805 (1988)]. It is further shown that the problem cannot be reduced further than to a two-dimensional partial differential equation. Next, the generalized ballooning equation is solved analytically for a circular tokamak equilibrium with sonic flows, but with a small rotation shear compared to the sound speed. With this ordering, the centrifugal forces are comparable to the pressure gradient forces driving the instability, but coupling of the mode with the sound wave is avoided. A new stability criterion is derived that explicitly demonstrates that flow shear is stabilizing at constant centrifugal force gradient.