Temperature-dependent Saturation of Weibel-type Instabilities in Counter-streaming Plasmas
Abstract
We present the first 2X2V continuum Vlasov-Maxwell simulations of interpenetrating, unmagnetized plasmas to study the competition between two-stream, Oblique, and filamentation modes in the weakly relativistic regime. We find that after nonlinear saturation of the fastest-growing two-stream and Oblique modes, the effective temperature anisotropy, which drives current filament formation via the secular Weibel instability, has a strong dependence on the internal temperature of the counter-streaming plasmas. The effective temperature anisotropy is significantly more reduced in colder than in hotter plasmas, leading to orders of magnitude lower magnetization for colder plasmas. A strong dependence of the energy conversion efficiency of Weibel-type instabilities on internal beam temperature has implications for determining their contribution to the observed magnetization of many astrophysical and laboratory plasmas.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1902.08672,
title = {Temperature-dependent Saturation of Weibel-type Instabilities in Counter-streaming Plasmas},
author = {V. Skoutnev and A. Hakim and J. Juno and J. M. TenBarge},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.08672},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication in ApJL. 6 pages, 5 figures