Experimental observation of a current-driven instability in a neutral electron-positron beam

Abstract

We report on the first experimental observation of a current-driven instability developing in a quasi-neutral matter-antimatter beam. Strong magnetic fields ($\ge$ 1 T) are measured, via means of a proton radiography technique, after the propagation of a neutral electron-positron beam through a background electron-ion plasma.The experimentally determined equipartition parameter of ${\epsilon }_B\approx 10^{-3}$, is typical of values inferred from models of astrophysical gamma-ray bursts, in which the relativistic flows are also expected to be pair dominated. The data, supported by Particle-In-Cell simulations and simple analytical estimates, indicate that these magnetic fields persist in the background plasma for thousands of inverse plasma frequencies. The existence of such long-lived magnetic fields can be related to analog astrophysical systems, such as those prevalent in lepton-dominated jets.

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Cited by in corpus (18)

• Charged particle motion and radiation in strong electromagnetic fields
• Relativistic Plasma Physics in Supercritical Fields
• Stability analysis of a periodic system of relativistic current filaments
• Retrieving fields from proton radiography without source profiles
• Generating ultra-dense pair beams using 400 GeV/c protons
• One-dimensional thermal pressure-driven expansion of a pair cloud into an electron-proton plasma
• Saturation of the asymmetric current filamentation instability under conditions relevant to relativistic shock precursors
• Expansion of a mildly relativistic hot pair cloud into an electron-proton plasma
• Impact of the electron to ion mass ratio on unstable systems in particle-in-cell simulations
• Polarized light from the transportation of a matter-antimatter beam in a plasma
• Thermalization of electron-positron plasma with quantum degeneracy
• Collisionless tangential discontinuity between pair plasma and electron-proton plasma
• General features of experiments on the dynamics of laser-driven electron-positron beams
• Maximum entropy states of collisionless positron-electron plasma in a dipole magnetic field
• Generation of quasi continuous-wave electron beams in an L-band normal conducting pulsed RF injector for laboratory astrophysics experiments
• Multi-scale simulations of particle acceleration in astrophysical systems
• Generalized slab universal instability and its appearance in pair plasma
• High-order harmonic generation in an electron-positron-ion plasma