Kinetic simulations of ladder climbing by electron plasma waves

Abstract

The energy of plasma waves can be moved up and down the spectrum using chirped modulations of plasma parameters, which can be driven by external fields. Depending on whether the wave spectrum is discrete (bounded plasma) or continuous (boundless plasma), this phenomenon is called ladder climbing (LC) or autoresonant acceleration of plasmons. It was first proposed by Barth \textit{et al.} [PRL \textbf{115}, 075001 (2015)] based on a linear fluid model. In this paper, LC of electron plasma waves is investigated using fully nonlinear Vlasov-Poisson simulations of collisionless bounded plasma. It is shown that, in agreement with the basic theory, plasmons survive substantial transformations of the spectrum and are destroyed only when their wave numbers become large enough to trigger Landau damping. Since nonlinear effects decrease the damping rate, LC is even more efficient when practiced on structures like quasiperiodic Bernstein-Greene-Kruskal (BGK) waves rather than on Langmuir waves \textit{per~se}.

References in corpus (12)

• Theory of nonlinear Landau-Zener tunneling
• Quantum and Classical Chirps in an Anharmonic Oscillator
• Langmuir wave linear evolution in inhomogeneous nonstationary anisotropic plasma
• Plasma Wave Seed for Raman Amplifiers
• Quantum versus classical phase-locking transition in a driven-chirped oscillator
• Experimental Study of Parametric Autoresonance in Faraday Waves
• Chirped-Frequency Excitation of Gravitationally Bound Ultracold Neutrons
• The various manifestations of collisionless dissipation in wave propagation
• Quantum phenomena in a chirped parametric anharmonic oscillator
• Ladder Climbing and Autoresonant Acceleration of Plasma Waves
• Two-photon ladder climbing and transition to autoresonance in a chirped oscillator
• Landau-Zener Tunneling of Solitons

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• Dispersion chain of quantum mechanics equations
• Quantum versus classical effects in the chirped-drive discrete nonlinear Schrodinger equation
• Quantum versus classical chirps in a Rydberg atom
• The Vlasov equation correct application based on the higher orders kinematic values for the dissipative systems description