Weibel Instability in Collisionless Plasmas Across Astrophysical and Laboratory Shocks
Abstract
We present a cold-fluid analysis of the purely transverse Weibel (current-filamentation) instability across four regimes: non-relativistic (NR) single-species, NR multi-species, relativistic single-species, and relativistic multi-species (electron--positron and electron--proton). Beginning from linearized fluid equations, we derive the dispersion relations in each regime and extract scaling laws for the maximum growth rate and characteristic unstable wavenumber . Relativistic corrections suppress by up to 40 per cent above , peaking near . Multi-species effects are significant only for . For the tabletop laser experiment of Bai et al., Nat.Commun., 16, 3770 (2025), the cold-fluid prediction gives , within 2 per cent of the measured filament spacing . The saturation field estimate T is an upper bound, consistent with the measured T under kinetic suppression. Two MMS burst-mode bow shock crossings (October 16, 2015 and November 25, 2017) confirm from FGM/FPI data. A multi-environment scatter plot spans 21 orders of magnitude in , with all points within a factor of 3 of the 1:1 line.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.12747,
title = {Weibel Instability in Collisionless Plasmas Across Astrophysical and Laboratory Shocks},
author = {Vivek Shrivastav and Mani K Chettri and Hemam D Singh and Britan Singh and Rupak Mukherjee},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.12747},
year = {2026}
}