Zonal flows in tokamak plasmas with toroidal rotation.

Zonal flows in tokamak plasmas with toroidal rotation are theoretically investigated. It is found that the low-frequency branch of zonal flows, which is linearly stable in a nonrotating system, becomes linearly unstable in a rotating tokamak, and that the high-frequency branch of zonal flows, the geodesic acoustic mode, can propagate in the poloidal direction with the frequency significantly lower than the frequency of the standing wave geodesic acoustic mode in the nonrotating system.