Abstract
The effect of equilibrium pressure diffusion parallel to the magnetic field on the interaction between a resistive interchange mode and a static magnetic island is studied by means of a nonlinear numerical simulation based on the reduced magnetohydrodynamics equations. Previous work for the case without the parallel diffusion of the equilibrium pressure [K. Saito et al., Phys. Plasmas 17, 062504 (2010)] showed that two solutions exist for a given error magnetic field: one indicates the increase of the island width in the nonlinear evolution of the interchange mode and the other indicates the decrease of the width. For the case with parallel diffusion of the equilibrium pressure, our present study shows that only the solution indicating the increase of the width exists; we discuss the causes for this.
