English

Ion heating and flow driven by an Instability found in Plasma Couette Flow

Plasma Physics 2021-05-12 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics Space Physics

Abstract

We present the first observation of instability in weakly magnetized, pressure dominated plasma Couette flow firmly in the Hall regime. Strong Hall currents couple to a low frequency electromagnetic mode that is driven by high-β\beta (>1>1) pressure profiles. Spectroscopic measurements show heating (factor of 3) of the cold, unmagnetized ions via a resonant Landau damping process. A linear theory of this instability is derived that predicts positive growth rates at finite β\beta and shows the stabilizing effect of very large β\beta, in line with observations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.12657,
  title  = {Ion heating and flow driven by an Instability found in Plasma Couette Flow},
  author = {J. Milhone and K. Flanagan and J. Egedal and D. Endrizzi and J. Olson and E. E. Peterson and J. C. Wright and C. B. Forest},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.12657},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

submitted for review to PRL on 3/10/2021

R2 v1 2026-06-24T00:28:49.785Z