Shear, Periodicity, and Plasma Ballooning Modes

A procedure which reconciles long parallel wavelength, characteristic of plasma instabilities, with periodicity in a sheared toroidal magnetic field is described. Applied to the problem of high-$n$ ballooning modes in tokamaks it makes possible a full minimization of the potential energy functional $\ensuremath{\delta}W$ and shows that previous calculations overestimated stability.