A thin-shell instability in collisionless plasma
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
2015-09-30 v1 Plasma Physics
Abstract
The thin-shell instability has been named as one process, which can generate entangled structures in astrophysical plasma on collisional (fluid) scales. It is driven by a spatially varying imbalance between the ram pressure of the inflowing upstream plasma and the downstream's thermal pressure at a non-planar shock. Here we show by means of a particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation that an analogue process can destabilize a thin shell formed by two interpenetrating, unmagnetized and collisionless plasma clouds. The amplitude of the shell's spatial modulation grows and saturates after about ten inverse proton plasma frequencies, when the shell consists of connected piecewise linear patches.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1509.04504,
title = {A thin-shell instability in collisionless plasma},
author = {M. E. Dieckmann and H. Ahmed and D. Doria and G. Sarri and R. Walder and D. Folini and A. Bret and A. Ynnerman and M. Borghesi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.04504},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
5 pages, 6 figures