Sensitivity of kinetic ballooning mode instability to tokamak equilibrium implementations

Global, first-principles study of the kinetic ballooning mode (KBM) is crucial to understand tokamak edge physics in high-confinement mode (H-mode). In contrast to the ion temperature gradient mode and trapped electron mode, the KBM is found to be very sensitive to the equilibrium implementations in gyrokinetic codes. In this paper, we show that a second-order difference in Shafranov shift or geometric coordinates, or a difference between local and global profile implementations can bring a factor of two or more discrepancy in real frequency and growth rate. This suggests that an accurate global equilibrium is required for validation of gyrokinetic KBM simulations.