Robustness of the filamentation instability for asymmetric plasma shells collision in arbitrarily oriented magnetic field

Abstract

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 completely suppress this instability. In a recent paper [PHYSICS OF PLASMAS 18, 080706 (2011)], it was demonstrated in two dimensions that for the case of two cold, symmetric, relativistically colliding shells, such cancellation cannot occur if the field is not perfectly aligned. Here, this result is extended to the case of two asymmetric shells. The filamentation instability appears therefore as an increasingly robust mechanism to generate shocks.

3 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Physics of Plasmas

References in corpus (4)

• Particle acceleration in relativistic collisionless shocks: Fermi process at last?
• On the structure of relativistic collisionless shocks in electron-ion plasmas
• Exact relativistic kinetic theory of an electron beam-plasma system: hierarchy of the competing modes in the system parameter space
• Robustness of the filamentation instability for asymmetric plasma shells collision in arbitrarily oriented magnetic field

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Hierarchy of instabilities for two counter-streaming magnetized pair beams: influence of field obliquity
• Robustness of the filamentation instability in arbitrarily oriented magnetic field: Full 3D calculation
• Robustness of the filamentation instability for asymmetric plasma shells collision in arbitrarily oriented magnetic field