Related papers: A thin-shell instability in collisionless plasma
When two plasmas collide, their interaction can be mediated by collisionless plasma instabilities or binary collisions between particles of each shell. By comparing the maximum growth rate of the collisionless instabilities with the…
Collisionless shocks are ubiquitous in astrophysics and in the lab. Recent numerical simulations and experiments have shown how they can arise from the encounter of two collisionless plasma shells. When the shells interpenetrate, the…
A plasma instability theory is presented for the prompt radiation from gamma-ray bursts. In the theory, a highly relativistic shell interacts with the interstellar medium through the filamentation and the two-stream instabilities to convert…
The filamentation instability triggered when two counter streaming plasma shells overlap appears to be the main mechanism by which collisionless shocks are generated. It has been known for long that a flow aligned magnetic field can…
The nonlinear thin-shell instability (NTSI) may explain some of the turbulent hydrodynamic structures that are observed close to the collision boundary of energetic astrophysical outflows. It develops in nonplanar shells that are bounded on…
In a recent one-dimensional numerical fluid simulation study [Saxena et al., Phys. Plasmas 13,032309 (2006)], it was found that an instability is associated with a special class of one-dimensional nonlinear solutions for modulated light…
Particle acceleration in collisionless plasma systems is a central question in astroplasma and astroparticle physics. The structure of the acceleration regions, electron-ion energy equilibration, preacceleration of particles at shocks to…
We investigate the role of thermal instability, arising from radiative cooling of an optically thin, dusty plasma, by linear stability analysis. The corresponding isobaric stability condition for condensation mode is found to be modified…
A pair of curved shocks in a collisionless plasma is examined with a two-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. The shocks are created by the collision of two electron-ion clouds at a speed that exceeds everywhere the threshold…
Weakly collisional space plasmas are rarely in local thermal equilibrium and often exhibit non-Maxwellian electron and ion velocity distributions that lead to the growth of microinstabilities, that is, enhanced electric and magnetic fields…
The linear stability analysis of an optically thin plasma where a general reaction proceeds, including chemical relaxation time effects, is carried out . A fifth order dispersion equation (instead of the fourth order one resulting when such…
In the past years we have experienced an increasing interest in understanding of the physical properties of collisionless plasmas, mostly because of the large number of astrophysical environments, e.g. the intracluster medium (ICM),…
Energetic electromagnetic emissions by astrophysical jets like those that are launched during the collapse of a massive star and trigger gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are partially attributed to relativistic internal shocks. The shocks are…
Plasma instabilities can be encountered in many branches of physics. This work focuses on relativistic plasmas with applications in theoretical astrophysics and particle accelerator physics. Even though these fields seem to be unrelated the…
The relationship between a decaying strong turbulence and kinetic instabilities in a slowly expanding plasma is investigated using two-dimensional (2-D) hybrid expanding box simulations. We impose an initial ambient magnetic field…
Spontaneous material shape changes, such as swelling, growth or thermal expansion, can be used to trigger dramatic elastic instabilities in thin shells. These instabilities originate in geometric incompatibility between the preferred…
We explore analytically the structure of relativistic shock and solitary wave solutions in collisionless plasmas. In the wave frame of reference, a cold plasma is flowing from one end and impacting on a low velocity plasma. First we show…
The localized deposition of the energy of a laser pulse, as it ablates a solid target, introduces high thermal pressure gradients in the plasma. The thermal expansion of this laser-heated plasma into the ambient medium (ionized residual…
We describe our modelling of the radiatively cooling shocks and their thin shells with various numerical tools in different physical and calculational setups. We inspect structure of the dense shell, its formation and evolution, pointing…
Microscopic instability and macroscopic flow pattern resulting from colliding plasmas are studied analytically in support of laboratory experiments. The plasma flows are assumed to stream radially from two separate centers. In a…