Related papers: A thin-shell instability in collisionless plasma
Parker instability arises from the presence of magnetic fields in a plasma in a gravitational field such as the interstellar medium (ISM), wherein the magnetic buoyant pressure expels the gas and causes the gas to move along the field…
Plasma turbulence is the dominant transport mechanism for heat and particles in magnetized plasmas in linear devices and tokamaks, so the study of turbulence is important in limiting and controlling this transport. Linear devices provide an…
It is shown that the transport in low temperature, collisional, bounded plasma is enhanced by instabilities at high magnetic field. While the magnetic field confines the electrons in a stable plasma, the instability completely destroys the…
The expansion of a radial blast shell into an ambient plasma is modeled with a particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. The unmagnetized plasma consists of electrons and protons. The formation and evolution of an electrostatic shock is observed,…
Hot-cold ablative mixing plasmas are ubiquitous in astrophysical and laboratory systems, where a cold/dense plasma is roughly in pressure balance with a hot/dilute plasma. Examples include the plasma thermal quench during major disruptions…
Relativistic radiation mediated shocks (RRMS) likely form in prodigious cosmic explosions. The structure and emission of such shocks is regulated by copious production of electron-positron pairs inside the shock transition layer. It has…
The collision of two expanding plasma clouds is investigated, emphasizing instabilities and electron energization in the plasma mixing layer. This work is directly relevant to laboratory experiments with explosively-created laser or z-pinch…
This work explores a novel approach to mitigating turbulence in fusion plasmas through spatially modulated plasma profiles. By imposing a harmonic modulation on plasma parameters, we introduce conditions that alter the propagation…
A new statistical approach is presented to study the thermal instability process of optically thin unmagnetized plasma. In this approach the time evolution of mass distribution function over temperature is calculated. This function…
The instability of a monoenergetic electron beam in a collisional one-dimensional plasma bounded between grounded walls is considered both analytically and numerically. Collisions between electrons and neutrals are accounted for the plasma…
A collisionless shock wave is treated as a streaming plasma instability in the interstellar medium (ISM). We assume that in a steady state, this instability propagates through the ISM as a self-driven plasma instability, whereby the…
We analyze the stability of a thin plasma disk which is rotating around a compact astrophysical object and is embedded in the strong magnetic field of such a source. The aim of this study is the determination of a new type of unstable…
Traditionally the effects of MHD instabilities and micro-instabilities on plasma confinement are investigated separately. However, these two instabilities often occur simultaneously, with the overlap of the dynamics on a broad range of…
Dynamics of the magnetospheric plasma configuration intrinsically features intermittent slow and fast phases. The fast transition is a nonlinear process, loss of equilibrium which ends up the slow quasi-static evolution. The process is…
The formation of unmagnetized electrostatic shock-like structures with a high Mach number is examined with one- and two-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. The structures are generated through the collision of two identical…
The Kelvin-Helmholtz instability is a ubiquitous physical process in ordinary fluids and plasmas, frequently observed also in space environments. In this paper, kinetic effects at proton scales in the nonlinear and turbulent stage of the…
The microbunching instability usually exists in the LINAC of a free electron laser (FEL) facility. In many cases, the longitudinal space charge (LSC) is a dominant factor that generates the instability. For the highly bright electron beams,…
For plasma velocity space instabilities driven by particle distributions significantly deviated from a Maxwellian, weak collisions can damp the instabilities by an amount that is significantly beyond the collisional rate itself. This is…
Plasma dynamics is a multi-scale problem that involves many spatial and temporal scales. Turbulence connects the disparate scales in this system through a cascade that is established by nonlinear interactions. Most astrophysical plasma…
We study with a two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulation the stability of a discontinuity or piston, which separates an electron-positron cloud from a cooler electron-proton plasma. Such a piston might be present in the relativistic jets…