Steady state drift vortices in plasmas with shear flow in equilibrium

The Hasegawa-Mima equation in the presence of sheared poloidal flow is solved for two-dimensional steady state vortex. It is shown that when the phase velocity of the vortex is the same as the diamagnetic drift velocity, an exact solution in the form of counter-rotating vortices may appear. In the small amplitude limit near the origin this solution reduces to a localized Lamb-dipole. (C) 1999 American Institute of Physics.