Kinetic instability in inductively oscillatory plasma equilibrium

Abstract

A uniform in space, oscillatory in time plasma equilibrium sustained by a time-dependent current density is analytically and numerically studied resorting to particle-in-cell simulations. The dispersion relation is derived from the Vlasov equation for oscillating equilibrium distribution functions, and used to demonstrate that the plasma has an infinite number of unstable kinetic modes. This instability represents a new kinetic mechanism for the decay of the initial mode of infinite wavelength (or equivalently null wavenumber), for which no classical wave breaking or Landau damping exists. The relativistic generalization of the instability is discussed. In this regime, the growth rate of the fastest growing unstable modes scales with ${\gamma }_T^{-1/2}$, where ${\gamma }_T$ is the largest Lorentz factor of the plasma distribution. This result hints that this instability is not as severely suppressed for large Lorentz factor flows as purely streaming instabilities. The relevance of this instability in inductive electric field oscillations driven in pulsar magnetospheres is discussed.

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Electric field screening in pair discharges and generation of pulsar radio emission
• Accelerating Particle-in-Cell Kinetic Plasma Simulations via Reduced-Order Modeling of Space-Charge Dynamics using Dynamic Mode Decomposition
• Model of pulsar pair cascades in non uniform electric fields: growth rate, density profile and screening time
• Two-Stream Instability and Bernstein-Greene-Kruskal Mode Formation in Coulomb One Component Plasma