Cosmic-ray current-driven instabilities -- revisiting environmental conditions
Abstract
The growth of magneto-hydrodynamic fluctuations relevant to cosmic ray confinement in and near their sources, and the effects of local plasma conditions is revisited. We consider cases where cosmic rays penetrate a medium which may contain a fraction of neutral particles, and explore the possible effects of high-order cosmic-ray anisotropies. An algorithm for calculating the dispersion relation for arbitrary distributions, and anisotropies is presented, and a general solution for power-law cosmic-ray distributions is provided. Implications for the resulting instabilities near to strong Galactic cosmic-ray sources are discussed. We argue that cosmic-ray streaming in weakly ionised plasmas eliminates the need for the existence of an evanescent band in the dispersion relation, a conclusion which may be confirmed by gamma-ray observations. The necessity for additional multi-scale numerical simulations is highlighted, as understanding the non-linear behaviour is crucial.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2102.00334,
title = {Cosmic-ray current-driven instabilities -- revisiting environmental conditions},
author = {B. Reville and G. Giacinti and R. Scott},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.00334},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
Accepted to MNRAS