Perpendicular electron dynamics and the associated collisions are discussed in relation to the collisional drift wave instability. In addition, the limit of small parallel wave numbers of this instability is studied and it is shown to yield a reduced wave frequency. It is also shown that in this case the growth rate in fact {\em decreases} for smaller parallel wave numbers, instead of growing proportional to $1/k_z^2$. As a result, the growth rate appears to be angle dependent and to reach a maximum for some specific direction of propagation. The explanation for this strange behavior is given. A similar analysis is performed for acoustic perturbations in plasmas with unmagnetized ions and magnetized electrons, in the presence of a density gradient.
The external and independent control of plasma flow velocity shears parallel and perpendicular to magnetic field lines is realized using segmented collisionless-plasma sources. Electrostatic ion-cyclotron instabilities are observed to be suppressed by the perpendicular flow velocity shears, the suppression physics of which is found to be distinguished into two aspects. On the other hand, the parallel flow velocity shears are demonstrated to destabilize the ion-cyclotron instabilities depending on the sign of the parallel shear in the absence of field-aligned electron drift flow.
The effects of velocity shear on the unstable modes driven by the effective gravity (Rayleigh-Taylor and interchange) and resistive drift wave instabilities for inhomogeneous equilibrium fluid/plasma density are analyzed for the localized eigenmode problems. It is shown that the effect of the velocity shear drastically depends on the type of instability. Whereas the velocity shear can significantly suppress both Rayleigh-Taylor and interchange instabilities, it has only a week impact on the growth rate of the resistive drift wave. This is directly related to the physical nature of these instab…
Electrostatic drift instabilities driven by ion and electron temperature gradients (ITG and ETG instabilities) are considered for the ranges of perpendicular wave number values from the inverse ion thermal gyroradius up to the electron thermal gyroradius. The analysis is carried out in the framework of the local kinetic approach. Scaling laws for instability parameters are presented. These scaling laws can be used as a basis of collisionless plasma transport rates in magnetic traps with purely poloidal magnetic field topology.
The non-modal kinetic theory of the kinetic drift instability of plasma shear flows [Phys.Plasmas, 18, 062103 (2011)] is extended to the investigation of the long-time evolution of the hydrodynamic ion temperature gradient and resistive drift instabilities in plasma shear flow. We find, that these hydrodynamic instabilities passed in their temporal evolution in shear flow through the kinetic stage of the evolution. In linear theory, this evolution involves the time dependent, due to flow shear, effects of the finite Larmor radius, which resulted in the non-modal effect of the decrease with tim…
The drift-Alfven instabilities in the magnetic field aligned (parallel) sheared flow of a finite beta plasma with comparable inhomogeneous ion temperature and homogeneous electron temperature are examined. The development of instabilities are quantitatively discussed on the basis of numerical solution of a set of equations for the electrostatic and electromagnetic potentials. It is found that the accounting for the electromagnetic ion kinetic response, which has been ignored usually in existing discussions of the drift-Alfven instabilities of a steady plasma, reveals new drift-Alfven instabili…
Mecheri and Marsch concluded that drift currents caused by density gradients can serve as an energy source for a plasma instability, in particular for the excitation of ion-cyclotron waves in the solar corona. It is pointed out that these authors overlooked some fundamental properties of the drift motion in inhomogeneous plasmas. The calculation is repeated, taking into account the missing terms. It is shown that the diamagnetic drift, which is essential for the new physical phenomena obtained by Mecheri and Marsch, can not contribute to the flux in the continuity equation. Moreover, the part …
A method of Parity-Time (PT)-symmetry analysis is introduced to study the high dimensional, complicated parameter space of drift wave instabilities. We show that spontaneous PT-symmetry breaking leads to the Ion Temperature Gradient (ITG) instability of drift waves, and the collisional instability is the result of explicit PT-symmetry breaking. A new unstable drift wave induced by finite collisionality is identified. It is also found that gradients of ion temperature and density can destabilize the ion cyclotron waves when PT symmetry is explicitly broken by a finite collisionality.
A four-dimensional plasma model able to describe the scrape-off layer region of tokamak devices at arbitrary collisionality is derived in the drift-reduced limit. The basis of the model is provided by a drift-kinetic equation that retains the full non-linear Coulomb collision operator and describes arbitrarily far from equilibrium distribution functions. By expanding the dependence of distribution function over the perpendicular velocity in a Laguerre polynomial basis and integrating over the perpendicular velocity, a set of four-dimensional moment equations for the expansion coefficients of t…
The kinetic effects of electrons are important to long wavelength magnetohydrodynamic(MHD)instabilities and short wavelength drift-Alfvenic instabilities responsible for turbulence transport in magnetized plasmas, since the non-adiabatic electron can interact with, modify and drive the low frequency instabilities. A novel conservative split weight scheme is proposed for the electromagnetic simulation with drift kinetic electrons in tokamak plasmas, which shows great computational advantages that there is no numerical constrain of electron skin depth on the perpendicular grid size without sacri…
The integration of kinetic effects in fluid models is important for global simulations of the Earth's magnetosphere. We use a two-fluid ten moment model, which includes the pressure tensor and has been used to study reconnection, to study the drift kink and lower hybrid drift instabilities. Using a nonlocal linear eigenmode analysis, we find that for the kink mode, the ten moment model shows good agreement with kinetic calculations with the same closure model used in reconnection simulations, while the electromagnetic and electrostatic lower hybrid instabilities require modeling the effects of…
We examine the electron-ion streaming instabilities driven by drift velocities of the order of the electron thermal velocity in a nonmagnetized plasma by one-dimensional electrostatic particle-in-cell code which adopts an ion-to-electron mass ratio of 1600. An initial state is set up where the ion bulk speed is zero while the electrons drift relative to ions, and where electrons are much hotter. We examine in detail four runs where drift velocity is systematically varied from lower than to larger than the electron thermal velocity. In all runs the Langmuir waves with Doppler-shifted frequencie…
MATLAB solver for general dispersion relation has been developed to study local instabilities in partially magnetized plasmas typical for ExB discharges. Several examples of the Simon-Hoh, lower-hybrid and ion-sound instabilities with the parameters typical for Penning discharge are shown. This solver allows parametrically investigate the local dispersion relation for the wide range of plasma parameters and prepare reports.
The Buneman and ion acoustic instabilities are usually associated with different electron and ion drift velocities, in such a way that there is a large current through the plasma. However, due to the recently discovered current-driven Langmuir oscillations (1-3), the relative drift velocity in these configurations will oscillate at the plasma frequency, and with an amplitude of at least the initial drift velocity. In contrast, the textbooks assume a constant drift velocity. Since the growth rates arrived at under that assumption are far less than the plasma frequency, several oscillation perio…
We develop a general theory of buoyancy instabilities in the electron-ion plasma with the electron heat flux based not upon MHD equations, but using a multicomponent plasma approach in which the momentum equation is solved for each species. We investigate the geometry in which the background magnetic field is perpendicular to the gravity and stratification. General expressions for the perturbed velocities are given without any simplifications. Collisions between electrons and ions are taken into account in the momentum equations in a general form, permitting us to consider both weakly and stro…
The stability of current sheets in collisionless relativistic pair plasma was studied via two-dimensional two-fluid relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations with vanishing internal friction between fluids. In particular, we investigated the linear growth of the tearing and drift-kink modes in the current sheets both with and without the guide field and obtained the growth rates which are very similar to what has been found in the corresponding PIC simulations. This suggests that the two-fluid simulations can be useful in studying the large-scale dynamics of astrophysical relativistic plasm…
The drift wave in the presence of impurity ions was investigated numerically in reversed field pinch (RFP) plasmas, using the gyrokinetic integral eigenmode equation. It was found that in RFP plasmas with hollow density profiles, an increase in $k_θρ_s$ increases the growth rate of the ion temperature gradient (ITG). Comparing the results of regular and hollow plasma density profile shows that the ITG mode under the hollow density profile is much harder to be excited. For the impurities' effects, when the impurities' density gradient is opposite to the primary ions, namely when $L_{ez}$ is neg…
We present the first three-dimensional hybrid simulations of the evolution of ion-scale current sheets, with an investigation of the role of temperature anisotropy and associated kinetic instabilities on the growth of the tearing instability and particle heating. We confirm the ability of the ion cyclotron and firehose instabilities to enhance or suppress reconnection, respectively. The simulations demonstrate the emergence of persistent three-dimensional structures, including patchy reconnection sites and the fast growth of a narrow-band drift-kink instability, which suppresses reconnection f…
Drift instabilities contribute to the formation of edge turbulence and zonal flows, and thus the anomalous transport in tokamaks. Experiments often found micro-scale tur- bulence strongly coupled with large-scale magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) processes, whereas a general framework has been lacking that can cover both regimes, in partic- ular, their coupling. In this paper, the linear resistive drift wave instability (DWI) is investigated using a full 2-fluid MHD model, as well as its numerical implementation in NIMROD code. Both analytical and numerical analyses reveal a macro-scale global drift w…
The instabilities of relativistic ion beams in a relativistically hot electron background are derived for general propagation angles. It is shown that the Weibel instability in the direction perpendicular to the streaming direction is the fastest growing mode, and probably the first to appear, consistent with the aligned filaments that are seen in PIC simulations. Oblique, quasiperpendicular modes grow almost as fast, as the growth rate varies only moderately with angle, and they may distort or corrugate the filaments after the perpendicular mode saturates.
The linear dispersion relation for collisionless kinetic tearing instabilities is calculated for a Harris equilibrium. In contrast to the conventional 2D geometry, which considers only modes at the center of the current sheet, modes can span the current sheet in 3D. Modes at each resonant surface have a unique angle ($θ$) with respect to the guide field direction. Both kinetic simulations and numerical eigenmode solutions of the linearized Vlasov-Maxwell equations have recently revealed that standard analytic theories vastly overestimate the growth rate of oblique modes ($θ\neq 0$). We find th…
The analysis of the wave content inside a perpendicular bow shock indicates that heating of ions is related to the Lower-Hybrid-Drift (LHD) instability, and heating of electrons to the Electron-Cyclotron-Drift (ECD) instability. Both processes represent stochastic acceleration caused by the electric field gradients on the electron gyroradius scales, produced by the two instabilities. Stochastic heating is a single particle mechanism where large gradients break adiabatic invariants and expose particles to direct acceleration by the DC- and wave-fields. The acceleration is controlled by function…
The complete short mean free path description of magnetized plasma in the drift ordering has recently been derived. The results correct the previous expressions for the ion pressure anisotropy (or parallel ion viscosity) and the perpendicular ion viscosity - the ion gyro-viscosity is unchanged. In addition, the electron problem is solved for the first time to obtain the electron pressure anisotropy (parallel electron viscosity) and the electron gyro-viscosity - the perpendicular electron viscosity is negligible. The results have been used to obtain a reduced fluid description appropriate to th…
Dissipation and particle acceleration in astrophysical jets with velocity and magnetic shear: Interaction of Kelvin-Helmholtz and Drift-Kink Instabilities
Long range correlations were measured using two remote reciprocating Langmuir probe systems at TJ-II. The influence of the rotational transform on the correlation was studied by scanning the magnetic configuration. A simple drift wave correlation model, assuming an exponential decay of the correlation with different correlation lengths in the directions parallel and perpendicular to the field lines, was found to describe the observations well at low densities. The experiment was repeated at gradually higher densities, and an additional correlation was detected at a critical value of the densit…
We show that the dispersion relation for gradient-drift and Farley-Buneman instabilities within the approximation of the two-fluid MHD should contain the terms which are traditionally supposed to be small. These terms are caused by taking into account divergence of particles velocity and electron density gradient along the magnetic field direction. It is shown that at heights below 115km the solution of the dispersion relation transforms into standard one, except the situations, when the electron density gradient is parallel to magnetic field or wave-vector. In these cases the traditionally ne…
Implicit discretization schemes for full-kinetic ion and drift-kinetic electron simulations
Southwestern Institute of Physics（西南物理研究院）；Department of Physics, University of Colorado at Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校物理系）；Institute of Plasma Physics, Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院等离子体物理研究所）
Secondary drift-driven instabilities in the presence of a parallel-propagating electromagnetic ion cyclotron wave and cold multi-component ions
University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Los Alamos National Laboratory（洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室）；Space Science Institute（太空科学研究所）；University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）
In a previous work [16], a new model was introduced, taking into account the role of the Fermi weak force due to neutrinos coupled to magnetohydrodynamic plasmas. The resulting neutrino-magnetohydrodynamics was investigated in a particular geometry associated with the magnetosonic wave, where the ambient magnetic field and the wavevector are perpendicular. The corresponding fast, short wavelength neutrino beam instability was then obtained in the context of supernova parameters. The present communication generalizes these results, allowing for arbitrary direction of wave propagation, including…
The electron firehose instabilities are among the most studied kinetic instabilities, especially in the context of space plasmas, whose dynamics is mainly controlled by collisionless wave-particle interactions. This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the aperiodic electron firehose instabilities excited either by the anisotropic temperature or by the electron counter-beaming populations. Two symmetric counter-beams provide an effective kinetic anisotropy similar to the temperature anisotropy of a single (non-drifting) population, with temperature along the magnetic field direction larg…
Kinetic instabilities in weakly collisional, high beta plasmas are investigated using two-dimensional hybrid expanding box simulations with Coulomb collisions modeled through the Langevin equation (corresponding to the Fokker-Planck one). The expansion drives a parallel or perpendicular temperature anisotropy (depending on the orientation of the ambient magnetic field). For the chosen parameters the Coulomb collisions are important with respect to the driver but are not strong enough to keep the system stable with respect to instabilities driven by the proton temperature anisotropy. In the cas…
Drift wave is a prominent mode of a magnetized plasma of inhomogeneous density. It plays an important role in the transport of particles, energy and momentum perpendicular to the ambient magnetic field. The frequency of this mode is governed by the inhomogeneity scale length and is much lower than the typical homogeneous plasma modes involving ions and electrons. In this work the possibility of coupling of this particular mode with the low frequency modes of a dusty plasma medium is considered.
We study the stability problem of a magnetohydrodynamic current sheet with the presence of a plasma jet. The flow direction is perpendicular to the normal of the current sheet and we analyze two cases: (1) The flow is along the anti-parallel component of the magnetic field; (2) The flow is perpendicular to the anti-parallel component of the magnetic field. A generalized equation set with the condition of incompressibility is derived and solved as a boundary-value-problem. For the first case, we show that, the streaming kink mode is stabilized by the magnetic field at $V_0/B_0 \lesssim 2$, wher…
Low Mach number, high beta fast mode shocks can occur in the magnetic reconnection outflows of solar flares. These shocks, which occur above flare loop tops, may provide the electron energization responsible for some of the observed hard X-rays and contemporaneous radio emission. Here we present new 2D particle-in-cell simulations of low Mach number/high beta quasi-perpendicular shocks. The simulations show that electrons above a certain energy threshold experience shock-drift-acceleration. The transition energy between the thermal and non-thermal spectrum and the spectral index from the simul…
Studies have shown that in sheared $\mathbf{E}\times\mathbf{B}$ flows in an inhomogeneous ionospheric plasma, the gradient drift (GDI) or the Kelvin-Helmholtz (KHI) instability may grow. This work examines the conditions that cause one of these instabilities to dominate over the other using a novel model to study localized ionospheric instabilities. The effect of collisions with neutral particles plays an important role in the instability development. It is found that the KHI is dominant in low collisionality regimes, the GDI is dominant in high collisionality regimes, and there exists an inte…
The destabilizing role of neutrino beams on the Trivelpiece-Gould modes is considered, assuming electrostatic perturbations in a magnetized plasma composed by electrons in a neutralizing ionic background, coupled to a neutrino species by means of an effective neutrino force arising from the electro-weak interaction. The magnetic field is found to significantly improve the linear instability growth rate, as calculated for Supernova type II environments. On the formal level, for wave vector parallel or perpendicular to the magnetic field the instability growth rate is found from the unmagnetized…
Boundary layers in space and astrophysical plasmas are the location of complex dynamics where different mechanisms coexist and compete eventually leading to plasma mixing. In this work, we present fully kinetic Particle-In-Cell simulations of different boundary layers characterized by the following main ingredients: a velocity shear, a density gradient and a magnetic gradient localized at the same position. In particular, the presence of a density gradient drives the development of the lower hybrid drift instability (LHDI), which competes with the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI) in the deve…
Relative drifts between different species or particle populations are characteristic to solar plasma outflows, e.g., in the fast streams of the solar winds, coronal mass ejections and interplanetary shocks. This paper characterizes the dispersion and stability of the low-beta alpha/proton drifts in the absence of any intrinsic thermal anisotropies, which are usually invoked in order to stimulate various instabilities. The dispersion relations derived here describe the full spectrum of instabilities and their variations with the angle of propagation and plasma parameters. The results unveil a p…
Dissipation and particle acceleration at intermittent structures with velocity and magnetic shear: Interaction of Kelvin-Helmholtz and Drift-Kink instabilities
The extended-MHD NIMROD code [C.R. Sovinec and J.R. King, J. Comput. Phys. 229, 5803 (2010)] is verified against the ideal-MHD ELITE code [H.R. Wilson et al. Phys. Plasmas 9, 1277 (2002)] on a diverted tokamak discharge. When the NIMROD model complexity is increased incrementally, resistive and first-order finite-Larmour radius effects are destabilizing and stabilizing, respectively. The full result is compared to local analytic calculations which are found to overpredict both the resistive destabilization and drift stabilization in comparison to the NIMROD computations.
Using kinetic theory for homogeneous collisionless magnetized plasmas, we present an extended review of the plasma waves and instabilities and discuss the anisotropic response of generalized relativistic dielectric tensor and Onsager symmetry properties for arbitrary distribution functions. In general, we observe that for such plasmas only those electromagnetic modes whose magnetic field perturbations are perpendicular to the ambient magneticeld, i.e.,B1 \perp B0, are effected by the anisotropy. However, in oblique propagation all modes do show such anisotropic effects. Considering the non-rel…
The heat transport in the solar wind is dominated by the suprathermal electron populations, i.e., a tenuous halo and a field-aligned beam/strahl, with high energies and antisunward drifts along the magnetic field. Their evolution may offer plausible explanations for the rapid decrease of the heat flux with the solar wind expansion, typically invoked being the self-generated instabilities, or the so-called heat flux instabilities (HFIs). The present paper provides a unified description of the full spectrum of HFIs, as prescribed by the linear kinetic theory for high beta conditions ($β_e \gg 0.…
Modeling complex plasma instabilities in space plasmas - Three-component electron formalism of heat-flux instabilities
Ruhr-Universität Bochum（波鸿鲁尔大学）；KU Leuven（荷语鲁汶大学）；Comisión Chilena de Energía Nuclear（智利核能委员会）；Universidad Andres Bello（安德烈斯贝略大学）；University of Maria Curie-Skłodowska（玛丽亚·居里-斯克沃多夫斯卡大学）
The quantum mechanical effect on the plasma two-stream instability is studied based on the dielectric function approach. The analysis suggests that the degenerate plasma relevant to the inertial confinement fusion behaves differently from classical plasmas when the electron drift velocity is comparable to the Fermi velocity. For high wave vector comparable to the Fermi wave vector, the degenerate quantum plasma has larger regime of the two-stream instabilities than the classical plasma. A regime, where the plasma waves with the frequency larger than 1.5 times of the Langmuir wave frequency bec…
Fluid models that approximate kinetic effects have received attention recently in the modelling of large scale plasmas such as planetary magnetospheres. In three-dimensional reconnection, both reconnection itself and current sheet instabilities need to be represented appropriately. We show that a heat flux closure based on pressure gradients enables a ten moment fluid model to capture key properties of the lower-hybrid drift instability (LHDI) within a reconnection simulation. Characteristics of the instability are examined with kinetic and fluid continuum models, and its role in the three-dim…
The nonlinear development of streaming instabilities in the current layers formed during magnetic reconnection with a guide field is explored. Theory and 3-D particle-in-cell simulations reveal two distinct phases. First, the parallel Buneman instability grows and traps low velocity electrons. The remaining electrons then drive two forms of turbulence: the parallel electron-electron two-stream instability and the nearly-perpendicular lower hybrid instability. The high velocity electrons resonate with the turbulence and transfer momentum to the ions and low velocity electrons.
We propose a novel electron acceleration mechanism, which we call stochastic shock drift acceleration (SSDA), that extends the standard shock drift acceleration (SDA) for low-energy electrons at a quasi-perpendicular shock to include the effect of stochastic pitch-angle scattering. We demonstrate that the steady-state energy spectrum of electrons accelerated within the shock transition region becomes a power-law in the limit of strong scattering. The spectral index is independent of the pitch-angle scattering coefficient. On the other hand, the maximum energy attainable through the mechanism s…
We investigate the conditions under which parallel-propagating Alfvén/ion-cyclotron (A/IC) waves and fast-magnetosonic/whistler (FM/W) waves are driven unstable by the differential flow and temperature anisotropy of alpha particles in the solar wind. We focus on the limit in which $w_{\parallel α} \gtrsim 0.25 v_{\mathrm A}$, where $w_{\parallel α} $ is the parallel alpha-particle thermal speed and $v_{\mathrm A}$ is the Alfvén speed. We derive analytic expressions for the instability thresholds of these waves, which show, e.g., how the minimum unstable alpha-particle beam speed depends upon $…
