The growth of the longitudinal beam-plasma instability in the presence of an inhomogeneous background

Abstract

We study the longitudinal stability of beam-plasma systems in the presence of a density inhomogeneity in the background plasma. Previous works have focused on the non-relativistic regime where hydrodynamical models are used to evolve pre-existing Langmuir waves within inhomogeneous background plasmas. Here, for the first time we study the problem with kinetic equations in a fully-relativistic way. We do not assume the existence of Langmuir waves, and we focus on the rate and the mechanism by which waves are excited in such systems from an initial perturbation. We derive the structure of the unstable modes and compute an analytical approximation for their growth rates. Our computation is limited to dilute and cold beams, and shows an excellent agreement with particle-in-cell simulations performed using the SHARP code. We show that, due to such an inhomogeneity, the virulent beam-plasma instabilities in the intergalactic medium are not suppressed but their counterparts in the solar wind can be suppressed as evidenced by propagating type-III solar radio bursts.

arXiv comment23 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in the Journal of Plasma Physics; comments are welcome

References in corpus (24)

• A Review of Solar Type III Radio Bursts
• The Cosmological Impact of Luminous TeV Blazars I: Implications of Plasma Instabilities for the Intergalactic Magnetic Field and Extragalactic Gamma-Ray Background
• Search for Spatial Extension in High-Latitude Sources Detected by the Fermi Large Area Telescope
• Relativistic Pair Beams from TeV Blazars: A Source of Reprocessed GeV Emission rather than IGM Heating
• Relaxation of Blazar Induced Pair Beams in Cosmic Voids
• The Cosmological Impact of Luminous TeV Blazars II: Rewriting the Thermal History of the Intergalactic Medium
• The Lyman-alpha forest in a blazar-heated Universe
• The Cosmological Impact of Luminous TeV Blazars III: Implications for Galaxy Clusters and the Formation of Dwarf Galaxies
• PIC Simulations of the Effect of Velocity Space Instabilities on Electron Viscosity and Thermal Conduction
• The Effect of Nonlinear Landau Damping on Ultrarelativistic Beam Plasma Instabilities
• Missing Gamma-ray Halos and the Need for New Physics in the Gamma-ray Sky
• The electrostatic instability for realistic pair distributions in blazar/EBL cascades
• Evolution of Global Relativistic Jets: Collimations and Expansion with kKHI and the Weibel Instability
• SHARP: A Spatially Higher-order, Relativistic Particle-in-Cell Code
• The Linear Instability of Dilute Ultrarelativistic $e^{\pm }$ Pair Beams
• Collisionless Weibel shocks and electron acceleration in gamma-ray bursts
• Importance of resolving the spectral support of beam-plasma instabilities in simulations
• Energy loss of intergalactic pair beams: Particle-in-Cell simulation
• Growth of beam-plasma instabilities in the presence of background inhomogeneity
• Implications of Plasma Beam Instabilities for the Statistics of the Fermi Hard Gamma-ray Blazars and the Origin of the Extragalactic Gamma-Ray Background
• Revisit of non-linear Landau damping for electrostatic instability driven by blazar-induced pair beams
• Bow Ties in the Sky I: The Angular Structure of Inverse Compton Gamma-ray Halos in the Fermi Sky
• Collisionless electron-ion shocks in relativistic unmagnetized jet-ambient interactions: Non-thermal electron injection by double layer
• Bow Ties in the Sky II: Searching for Gamma-ray Halos in the Fermi Sky Using Anisotropy

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Progress on Cosmological Magnetic Fields
• The Gamma-Ray Window to Intergalactic Magnetism
• A new cosmic ray-driven instability
• The role of resonant plasma instabilities in the evolution of blazar induced pair beams
• Suppression of the TeV pair-beam plasma instability by a tangled weak intergalactic magnetic field
• Deciphering the physical basis of the intermediate-scale instability
• Energy Dissipation in Strong Collisionless Shocks: The Crucial Role of Ion-to-Electron Scale Separation in Particle-in-Cell Simulations
• Numerical simulations of a continuously injected relativistic electron beam relaxation into a plasma with large-scale density gradients
• Constraining blazar heating with the 2<z<3 Lyman-$\alpha$ forest
• Parallel Collisionless Shocks in strongly Magnetized Electron-Ion Plasma. I. Temperature anisotropies
• MeV cosmic-ray electrons modify the TeV pair-beam plasma instability
• Simulations of Astrophysically Relevant Pair Beam Instabilities in a Laboratory Context
• The mechanism of efficient electron acceleration at parallel non-relativistic shocks
• Beam-Plasma Dynamics in Finite-Length, Collisionless Inhomogeneous Systems