scholarly journals Lepton-driven Nonresonant Streaming Instability

2021 ◽  
Vol 923 (2) ◽  
pp. 208
Author(s):  
Siddhartha Gupta ◽  
Damiano Caprioli ◽  
Colby C. Haggerty

Abstract A strong super-Alfvénic drift of energetic particles (or cosmic rays) in a magnetized plasma can amplify the magnetic field significantly through nonresonant streaming instability (NRSI). While the traditional analysis is done for an ion current, here we use kinetic particle-in-cell simulations to study how the NRSI behaves when it is driven by electrons or by a mixture of electrons and positrons. In particular, we characterize the growth rate, spectrum, and helicity of the unstable modes, as well the level of the magnetic field at saturation. Our results are potentially relevant for several space/astrophysical environments (e.g., electron strahl in the solar wind, at oblique nonrelativistic shocks, around pulsar wind nebulae), and also in laboratory experiments.

2021 ◽  
Vol 87 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Srimanta Maity ◽  
Devshree Mandal ◽  
Ayushi Vashistha ◽  
Laxman Prasad Goswami ◽  
Amita Das

The mechanism of harmonic generation in both O- and X-mode configurations for a magnetized plasma has been explored here in detail with the help of particle-in-cell simulations. A detailed characterization of both the reflected and transmitted electromagnetic radiation propagating in the bulk of the plasma has been carried out for this purpose. The efficiency of harmonic generation is shown to increase with the incident laser intensity. A dependency of harmonic efficiency has also been found on magnetic field strength. This work demonstrates that there is an optimum value of the magnetic field at which the efficiency of harmonic generation maximizes. The observations are in agreement with theoretical analysis. For the O-mode configuration, this is compelling as the harmonic generation provides for a mechanism by which laser energy can propagate inside an overdense plasma region.


2012 ◽  
Vol 08 ◽  
pp. 144-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
LORENZO SIRONI ◽  
ANATOLY SPITKOVSKY

The relativistic wind of pulsars consists of toroidal stripes of opposite magnetic field polarity, separated by current sheets of hot plasma. By means of multi-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations, we investigate particle acceleration and magnetic field dissipation at the termination shock of a relativistic striped pulsar wind. At the shock, the flow compresses and the alternating fields annihilate by driven magnetic reconnection. Irrespective of the stripe wavelength λ or the wind magnetization σ (in the regime σ ≫1 of magnetically dominated flows), shock-driven reconnection transfers all the magnetic energy of alternating fields to the particles. In the limit λ/(rL σ) ≫ 1, where rL is the relativistic Larmor radius in the wind, the post-shock spectrum approaches a flat power-law tail with slope around -1.5, populated by particles accelerated by the reconnection electric field. Our findings place important constraints on the models of non-thermal radiation from Pulsar Wind Nebulae.


2010 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. ROSENBERG

AbstractThis brief communication discusses theoretically a resistive ion-dust streaming instability in a collisional dusty plasma, where the ions and electrons are magnetized, and the dust is unmagnetized. The instability is driven by ions streaming along the magnetic field. The emphasis is on the case where the dust has large thermal speed, and where the ion drift speed is ≲ the ion thermal speed. Application to possible laboratory experimental parameters is considered.


2006 ◽  
Vol 638 (1) ◽  
pp. 225-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland Kothes ◽  
Wolfgang Reich ◽  
Bulent Uyanıker

2014 ◽  
Vol 32 (10) ◽  
pp. 1207-1216 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Janhunen

Abstract. Plasma brake is a thin, negatively biased tether that has been proposed as an efficient concept for deorbiting satellites and debris objects from low Earth orbit. We simulate the interaction with the ionospheric plasma ram flow with the plasma-brake tether by a high-performance electrostatic particle in cell code to evaluate the thrust. The tether is assumed to be perpendicular to the flow. We perform runs for different tether voltage, magnetic-field orientation and plasma-ion mass. We show that a simple analytical thrust formula reproduces most of the simulation results well. The interaction with the tether and the plasma flow is laminar (i.e. smooth and not turbulent) when the magnetic field is perpendicular to the tether and the flow. If the magnetic field is parallel to the tether, the behaviour is unstable and thrust is reduced by a modest factor. The case in which the magnetic field is aligned with the flow can also be unstable, but does not result in notable thrust reduction. We also correct an error in an earlier reference. According to the simulations, the predicted thrust of the plasma brake is large enough to make the method promising for low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite deorbiting. As a numerical example, we estimate that a 5 km long plasma-brake tether weighing 0.055 kg could produce 0.43 mN breaking force, which is enough to reduce the orbital altitude of a 260 kg object mass by 100 km over 1 year.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 385-390
Author(s):  
Shikha BINWAL ◽  
Jay K JOSHI ◽  
Shantanu Kumar KARKARI ◽  
Predhiman Krishan KAW ◽  
Lekha NAIR ◽  
...  

A floating emissive probe has been used to obtain the spatial electron temperature (Te) profile in a 13.56 MHz parallel plate capacitive coupled plasma. The effect of an external transverse magnetic field and pressure on the electron temperature profile has been discussed. In the un-magnetised case, the bulk region of the plasma has a uniform Te. Upon application of the magnetic field, the Te profile becomes non-uniform and skewed.  With increase in pressure, there is an overall reduction in electron temperature. The regions adjacent to the electrodes witnessed a higher temperature than the bulk for both cases. The emissive probe results have also been compared with particle-in-cell simulation results for the un-magnetised case.


1983 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Mjølhus

The problem of linear conversion of an ordinary polarized electromagnetic wave in a magnetized plasma with density gradient parallel to the magnetic field is considered. An expression for the conversion coefficient as a function of angle of incidence, WKB parameter and magnetic field is obtained. The magnetic field leads to a narrowing of the range of angles of incidence leading to linear conversion, compared with the unmagnetized case.


2016 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Lemoine

Successful phenomenological models of pulsar wind nebulae assume efficient dissipation of the Poynting flux of the magnetized electron–positron wind as well as efficient acceleration of the pairs in the vicinity of the termination shock, but how this is realized is not yet well understood. This paper suggests that the corrugation of the termination shock, at the onset of nonlinearity, may lead towards the desired phenomenology. Nonlinear corrugation of the termination shock would convert a fraction of order unity of the incoming ordered magnetic field into downstream turbulence, slowing down the flow to sub-relativistic velocities. The dissipation of turbulence would further preheat the pair population on short length scales, close to equipartition with the magnetic field, thereby reducing the initial high magnetization to values of order unity. Furthermore, it is speculated that the turbulence generated by the corrugation pattern may sustain a relativistic Fermi process, accelerating particles close to the radiation reaction limit, as observed in the Crab nebula. The required corrugation could be induced by the fast magnetosonic modes of downstream nebular turbulence; but it could also be produced by upstream turbulence, either carried by the wind or seeded in the precursor by the accelerated particles themselves.


1994 ◽  
Vol 142 ◽  
pp. 797-806
Author(s):  
Jonathan Arons ◽  
Marco Tavani

AbstractWe discuss recent research on the structure and particle acceleration properties of relativistic shock waves in which the magnetic field is transverse to the flow direction in the upstream medium, and whose composition is either pure electrons and positrons or primarily electrons and positrons with an admixture of heavy ions. Particle-in-cell simulation techniques as well as analytic theory have been used to show that such shocks in pure pair plasmas are fully thermalized—the downstream particle spectra are relativistic Maxwellians at the temperature expected from the jump conditions. On the other hand, shocks containing heavy ions which are a minority constituent by number but which carry most of the energy density in the upstream medium do put ~20% of the flow energy into a nonthermal population of pairs downstream, whose distribution in energy space is N(E) ∝ E−2, where N(E)dE is the number of particles with energy between E and E + dE.The mechanism of thermalization and particle acceleration is found to be synchrotron maser activity in the shock front, stimulated by the quasi-coherent gyration of the whole particle population as the plasma flowing into the shock reflects from the magnetic field in the shock front. The synchrotron maser modes radiated by the heavy ions are absorbed by the pairs at their (relativistic) cyclotron frequencies, allowing the maximum energy achievable by the pairs to be γ±m±c2 = mic2γ1/Zi, where γ1 is the Lorentz factor of the upstream flow and Zi, is the atomic number of the ions. The shock’s spatial structure is shown to contain a series of “overshoots” in the magnetic field, regions where the gyrating heavy ions compress the magnetic field to levels in excess of the eventual downstream value.This shock model is applied to an interpretation of the structure of the inner regions of the Crab Nebula, in particular to the “wisps,” surface brightness enhancements near the pulsar. We argue that these surface brightness enhancements are the regions of magnetic overshoot, which appear brighter because the small Larmor radius pairs are compressed and radiate more efficiently in the regions of more intense magnetic field. This interpretation suggests that the structure of the shock terminating the pulsar’s wind in the Crab Nebula is spatially resolved, and allows one to measure γ1, and a number of other properties of the pulsar’s wind. We also discuss applications of the shock theory to the termination shocks of the winds from rotation-powered pulsars embedded in compact binaries. We show that this model adequately accounts for (and indeed predicted) the recently discovered X-ray flux from PSR 1957+20, and we discuss several other applications to other examples of these systems.Subject headings: acceleration of particles — ISM: individual (Crab Nebula) — relativity — shock waves


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