Velocity-Space Diffusion in a Perpendicularly Propagating Electrostatic Wave
Charles F. F. Karney
备注：
Plain TeX, 11 pages, 5 figures. In "Intrinsic Stochasticity in Plasmas", edited by G. Laval and D. Gresillon (Editions de Physique Courtaboeuf, Orsay, 1979), pp. 159-168. Proc. Workshop on Intrinsic Stochasticity in Plasmas, Cargese, Corsica, June 18-23, 1979
The motion of ions in the fields B = B_0 zhat and E = E_0 yhat cos(k_perp y - omega t) is considered. When omega >> Omega_i and v_perp > omega/k_perp, the equations of motion may be reduced to a set of difference equations. These equations exhibit stochastic behavior when E_0 exceeds a threshold. The diffusion coefficient above the threshold is determined. Far above the threshold, ion Landau damping is recovered. Extension of the method to include parallel propagation is outlined.
The problem of standing wave formation by superposing two counter-propagating whistler waves in an overdense plasma, studied recently by Sano et al. (Phys. Rev. E 100, 053205 (2019) and Phys. Rev. E 101, 013206 (2020)), has been revisited in the relativistic limit. A detailed theory along with simulation has been performed to study the standing wave formation in the interaction of two counter propagating relativistically intense whistler waves. The relativistic theory explains such interaction process more precisely and predicts correct field amplitudes of the standing wave for a much wider ra…
This paper studies the coherent acceleration of ions interacting with two electrostatic waves in a uniform magnetic field B0. This is a generalization of an earlier analysis of waves propagating perpendicularly to B0 to include the effect of wavenumbers along B0. The Lie transformation technique is used to develop a perturbation theory describing the ion motion, and results are compared with numerical solutions of the complete equations of motion. Coherent energization occurs when the Doppler-shifted wave frequencies differ by nearly an integer multiple of the ion cyclotron frequency. When the…
We present the results of three-dimensional (3D) ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations on the dynamics of a perpendicularly inhomogeneous plasma disturbed by propagating Alfvénic waves. Simpler versions of this scenario have been extensively studied as the phenomenon of phase mixing. We show that, by generalizing the textbook version of phase mixing, interesting phenomena are obtained, such as turbulence-like behavior and complex current-sheet structure, a novelty in longitudinally homogeneous plasma excited by unidirectionally propagating waves. This constitutes an important finding fo…
Charged particles can be accelerated via surfatron mechanism along dc magnetic field by obliquely propagating electrostatic waves. In plasma, this mechanism can, in principle, produce an average parallel current, even when the wave frequency is much larger than the gyrofrequency and the wave phase velocity is much larger than particle initial velocities.
Motivated by the suggestion that Born-Infeld plasmas could have significance for electron acceleration in neutron star crusts, we obtain an upper bound on the amplitude of electrostatic waves propagating parallel to a longitudinal magnetic field in a Born-Infeld plasma.
Electron-beam plasma interaction has long been a topic of great interest. Despite the success of Quasi-Linear (QL) theory and Weak Turbulence (WT) theory, their validities are limited by the requirement of sufficiently dense mode spectrum and small wave amplitude. In this paper, we extensively studied the collective processes of a mono-energetic electron beam emitted from a thermionic cathode propagating through a cold plasma by performing a large number of high resolution two-dimensional (2D) particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations and using analytical theories. We confirm that the initial stage o…
An intense X wave propagating perpendicularly to dc magnetic field is unstable with respect to a parametric decay into an electron Bernstein wave and a lower-hybrid wave. A modified theory of this effect is proposed that extends to the high-intensity regime, where the instability rate $γ$ ceases to be a linear function of the incident-wave amplitude. An explicit formula for $γ$ is derived and expressed in terms of cold-plasma parameters. Theory predictions are in reasonable agreement with the results of the particle-in-cell simulations presented in a separate publication.
The excitation of electrostatic waves in plasma by laser electromagnetic pulse is important as it provides a scheme by which the power from the laser electromagnetic (EM) field can be transferred into the plasma medium. The paper presents a fundamentally new ponderomotive pressure-driven mechanism of excitation of electrostatic waves in an overdense magnetized plasma by a finite laser pulse. Particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations using the EPOCH-4.17.10 framework have been utilized for the study of a finite laser pulse interacting with a magnetized overdense plasma medium. The external magnetic fi…
Abstract It is shown that electrostatic plasma wakefields can efficiently radiate at harmonics of the plasma frequency when the plasma has a positive density gradient along the propagation direction of a driver. The driver propagating at a sub-luminal group velocity excites the plasma wakefield with the same phase velocity. However, due to the positive density gradient, the wake phase velocity steadily increases behind the driver. As soon as the phase velocity becomes super-luminal, the electrostatic wakefield couples efficiently to radiative electromagnetic modes. The period of time when the …
Ion-acoustic modes propagating in unmagnetized dusty plasmas are studied by applying a generic collisionless fluid model. An Eulerian-to-Lagrangean variable transformation leads to a new system of evolution equations, which may be combined into a single (rather complex) equation for the mean ion density. The linear and weakly nonlinear oscillations regimes are studied and their modulational stability is investigated. This study extends known previous results on the Lagrangian description of electron- or ion-acoustic electrostatic plasma modes. The relevance with the description of dust-ion aco…
Over the last few decades, different types of plasma waves (e.g., the ion acoustic waves (IAWs), electrostatic solitary waves (ESWs), upper/lower hybrid waves, the Langmuir waves etc.) have been observed in the upstream, downstream and ramp regions of the collisionless interplanetary (IP) shocks. These waves appear as short duration (only a few milliseconds at 1 au) electric field signatures in the in-situ measurements, with typical frequencies $\sim1-10$ kHz. A number of IAW features at the IP shocks seem to be unexplained by kinetic models and requires a new modeling effort. Thus, this paper…
Oblique propagation of the spin-electron acoustic waves in degenerate magnetized plasmas is considered in terms of quantum kinetics with the separate spin evolution, where the spin-up electrons and the spin-down electrons are considered as two different species with different equilibrium distributions. It is considered in the electrostatic limit. Corresponding dispersion equation is derived. Analytical analysis of the dispersion equation is performed in the long-wavelength limit to find an approximate dispersion equation describing the spin-electron acoustic wave. The approximate dispersion eq…
The manuscript reports the observation of time dependent localized and non-propagating structures in the coupled laser plasma system through 1-D fluid and PIC simulations. It is reported that such structures form spontaneously as a result of collision amongst certain exact solitonic solutions. They are seen to survive as coherent entities for a long time up to several hundreds of plasma periods. Furthermore, it is shown that such time dependence can also be artificially recreated by significantly disturbing the delicate balance between the radiation and the density fields required for the exac…
The properties of electrostatic transverse shear waves propagating in a strongly coupled dusty plasma with an equilibrium density gradient are examined using the generalized hydrodynamic equation. In the usual kinetic limit, the resulting equation has similarity to zero energy Schrodinger's equation. This has helped in obtaining some exact eigenmode solutions in both cartesian and cylindrical geometries for certain nontrivial density profiles. The corresponding velocity profiles and the discrete eigenfrequencies are obtained for several interesting situations and their physics discussed.
Velocity distribution functions (VDFs) that exhibit a power-law dependence on the high-energy tail have been the subject of intense research by the plasma physics community. Such functions, known as kappa or superthermal distributions, have been found to provide a better fitting to the VDFs measured by spacecraft in the solar wind. One of the problems that is being addressed on this new light is the temperature anisotropy of solar wind protons and electrons. In the literature, the general treatment for waves excited by (bi-)Maxwellian plasmas is well-established. However, for kappa distributio…
The physics of plasmas containing positive and negative ions is discussed with special attention to the recently produced pair-ion plasma containing ions of equal mass and opposite charge. The effects of the density gradient in the direction perpendicular to the ambient magnetic field vector, observed in the experiment, are discussed. In addition, the possible presence of electrons is discussed in the context of plasma modes propagating at an angle with respect to the magnetic field vector. The electrons may either be added to the plasma or enter the plasma attached to negative ions and then b…
The Warm Plasma Dispersion Relation, for waves in the electron cyclotron resonance range of frequencies, can be cast into the form of a bi-quadratic equation for $N_\perp$, where the coefficients are a function of $N_\perp^2$ and an iterative procedure is required to obtain a solution. However, this iterative procedure is not well understood and fails to converge towards a solution at the second harmonic resonance layer. In particular at higher densities where the wave can couple to an electron Bernstein wave. This paper focuses on a solution to the poor convergence of the iterative method, en…
We investigate the acceleration of electrons via their interaction with electrostatic waves, driven by the relativistic Buneman instability, in a system dominated by counter-propagating proton beams. We observe the growth of these waves and their subsequent saturation via electron trapping for a range of proton beam velocities, from 0.15c to 0.9c. We can report a reduced stability of the electrostatic wave (ESW) with increasing non-relativistic beam velocities and an improved wave stability for increasing relativistic beam velocities, both in accordance with previous findings. At the highest b…
The propagation of an electrostatic wave packet inside a collisionless and initially Maxwellian plasma is always dissipative because of the irreversible acceleration of the electrons by the wave. Then, in the linear regime, the wave packet is Landau damped, so that in the reference frame moving at the group velocity, the wave amplitude decays exponentially with time. In the nonlinear regime, once phase mixing has occurred and when the electron motion is nearly adiabatic, the damping rate is strongly reduced compared to the Landau one, so that the wave amplitude remains nearly constant along th…
