English

Weibel Instability in Collisionless Plasmas Across Astrophysical and Laboratory Shocks

Plasma Physics 2026-03-16 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Solar and Stellar Astrophysics Space Physics

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 γmax\gamma_{\rm max} and characteristic unstable wavenumber kmax=ωpi/ck_{\rm max} = \omega_{pi}/c. Relativistic corrections suppress γmax\gamma_{\rm max} by up to 40 per cent above v00.2cv_0 \approx 0.2c, peaking near v00.9cv_0 \approx 0.9c. Multi-species effects are significant only for me/mi1/500m_e/m_i \gtrsim 1/500. For the tabletop laser experiment of Bai et al., Nat.Commun., 16, 3770 (2025), the cold-fluid prediction gives di=c/ωpi31.7μmd_i = c/\omega_{pi} \approx 31.7\,\mu{\rm m}, within 2 per cent of the measured filament spacing λF31μm\lambda_F \approx 31\,\mu{\rm m}. The saturation field estimate Bsat2.3×104B_{\rm sat} \approx 2.3\times10^4 T is an upper bound, consistent with the measured 5000\approx 5000 T under kinetic suppression. Two MMS burst-mode bow shock crossings (October 16, 2015 and November 25, 2017) confirm kmaxdi=1k_{\rm max} d_i = 1 from FGM/FPI data. A multi-environment scatter plot spans 21 orders of magnitude in nin_i, with all points within a factor of 3 of the 1:1 line.

Keywords

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}
}