Characteristics of the edge temperature ring oscillation during stationary improved confnement mode in EAST

I-mode is a natural ELMy-free regime with H-mode like improved energy confnement and L-mode like particle confnement, making it an attractive scenario for future tokamak based fusion reactors. A kind of low frequency oscillation was widely found and appeared to be unique in I-mode, with the frequency between stationary zonal flow and geodesic-acoustic mode (GAM) zonal flow. In EAST, 90 percent I-mode shots have such mode, called edge temperature ring oscillation (ETRO). The mode probably plays an important role during I-mode development and sustainment, while investigations are needed to clarify the differences between ETRO and the similar mode named as low frequency edge oscillation (LFEO) in AUG and C-Mod, especially whether it is still GAM. In the paper, the ETRO characteristics in EAST were investigated in detail and most do not agree with GAM, including that 1) during L-I transition with edge Te and Ti both increasing, ETRO has a smaller frequency than GAM; 2) ETRO has distinct harmonics in various diagnostics; 3) The magnetic component of ETRO is dominated by m = 1 structure; 4) ETRO is accompanied by turbulence transition between electron-scale and ion-scale; 5) As I-mode approaching to H-mode, ETRO frequency would decrease rapidly with Te increasing. These features imply that ETRO is probably caused by the stationary zonal flow with fnite frequency. Moreover, other damping mechanisms need to be involved besides collision in the Imode edge region. It was found that modest fueling could decrease the ETRO intensity with the I-mode confnement sustaining, suggesting that supersonic molecular beam injection (SMBI) could be used as an effective tool to control ETRO.