1. Electron Weibel instability in relativistic counterstreaming plasmas with flow-aligned external magnetic fields
- Author
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Andrea Macchi, F. Amiranoff, Anna Grassi, Francesco Pegoraro, Caterina Riconda, Mickael Grech, Laboratoire pour l'utilisation des lasers intenses (LULI), Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6 (UPMC)-Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA)-École polytechnique (X)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Enrico Fermi - Dipartimento di Fisica, University of Pisa - Università di Pisa, Istituto Nazionale di Ottica (INO), National Research Council of Italy | Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), and Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR)
- Subjects
[PHYS]Physics [physics] ,Physics ,Condensed matter physics ,FOS: Physical sciences ,Plasma ,Electron ,01 natural sciences ,Instability ,Weibel instability ,Physics - Plasma Physics ,010305 fluids & plasmas ,Magnetic field ,Plasma Physics (physics.plasm-ph) ,Wavelength ,Nonlinear system ,Quantum electrodynamics ,0103 physical sciences ,010306 general physics ,Saturation (magnetic) - Abstract
The Weibel instability driven by two symmetric counter-streaming relativistic electron plasmas, also referred to as current-filamentation instability, is studied in a constant and uniform external magnetic field aligned with the plasma flows. Both the linear and non linear stages of the instability are investigated using analytical modeling and Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulations. While previous studies have already described the stabilizing effect of the magnetic field, we show here that the saturation stage is only weakly affected. The different mechanisms responsible for the saturation are discussed in detail in the relativistic cold fluid framework considering a single unstable mode. The application of an external field leads to a slighlt increase of the saturation level for large wavelengths, while it does not affect the small wavelengths. Multi-mode and temperature effects are then investigated. While at large temperature the saturation level is independent of the external magnetic field, at small but finite temperature the competition between different modes in the presence of an external magnetic field leads to a saturation level lower with respect to the unmagnetized case., Submitted to Phys. Rev. E
- Published
- 2017
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