English

Instability in a magnetised collisional plasma driven by a heat flow or a current

Plasma Physics 2020-05-01 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

We solve the linearised Vlasov-Fokker-Planck (VFP) equation to show that heat flow or an electrical current in a magnetized collisional plasma is unstable to the growth of a circularly polarised transverse perturbation to a zeroth order uniform magnetic field. The Braginskii (1965) transport equations exhibit the same instability in the appropriate limit. This is relevant to laser-produced plasmas, inertial fusion energy (IFE) and to dense cold interstellar plasmas.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2004.14653,
  title  = {Instability in a magnetised collisional plasma driven by a heat flow or a current},
  author = {Anthony Bell and Robert Kingham and Henry Watkins and James Matthews},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.14653},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion

R2 v1 2026-06-23T15:12:24.240Z