No Arabic abstract
The generation of a magnetic field in a circular rarefaction wave is examined in form of a 2D particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. Electrons with a temperature of 32 keV are uniformly distributed within a cloud with a radius of 14.2 electron skin depths. They expand under their thermal pressure and carry with them the cold protons, which are initially concentrated in a hollow ring at the boundary of the electron cloud. The interior of the ring contains an immobile positive charge background that compensates for the electron charge. The protons expand in form of a circularly symmetric rarefaction wave and they extract energy from the electrons. A thermal anisotropy of the electrons develops and triggers through a Weibel-type instability the growth of TM waves within the plasma cloud, which acts as a wave guide. The changing cross section of this waveguide introduces a coupling between the TM wave and a TE wave and in-plane magnetic fields grow. The relevance of the simulation results to a previous experimental study of a laser-ablated wire is discussed.
The expansion of an initially unmagnetized planar rarefaction wave has recently been shown to trigger a thermal anisotropy-driven Weibel instability (TAWI), which can generate magnetic fields from noise levels. It is examined here if the TAWI can also grow in a curved rarefaction wave. The expansion of an initially unmagnetized circular plasma cloud, which consists of protons and hot electrons, into a vacuum is modelled for this purpose with a two-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. It is shown that the momentum transfer from the electrons to the radially accelerating protons can indeed trigger a TAWI. Radial current channels form and the aperiodic growth of a magnetowave is observed, which has a magnetic field that is oriented orthogonal to the simulation plane. The induced electric field implies that the electron density gradient is no longer parallel to the electric field. Evidence is presented here for that this electric field modification triggers a second magnetic instability, which results in a rotational low-frequency magnetowave. The relevance of the TAWI is discussed for the growth of small-scale magnetic fields in astrophysical environments, which are needed to explain the electromagnetic emissions by astrophysical jets. It is outlined how this instability could be examined experimentally.
The production of weakly relativistic plasma by microwave electric field with circular polarization has been studied. Electron distribution function obtained for this produced plasma and shown that it is non-equilibrium and anisotropic. It is shown that produced plasma accelerated on direction of propagation microwave electric field. The electron velocity on this direction strongly depends on electron origination phase during ionization and microwave electric field phase and it s amplitude. The dielectric tensor obtained for this plasma and the weibel instability studied for it.
We give theoretical analyses of the Magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor instability driven by a rotating magnetic field. Both slab and liner configurations with finite thicknesses are dealt with in the WKB and the non-WKB approximations. Results show that instabilities for all modes (combinations of wave vectors) are alleviated. We further discuss the potential application of the alternant/nested configurations of a theta and a Z pinch to the Theta-Z Liner Inertia Fusion (Theta-Z-LIF) concept.
It is shown by particle-in-cell simulation that intense circularly polarized (CP) laser light can be contained in the cavity of a solid-density circular Al-plasma shell for hundreds of light-wave periods before it is dissipated by laser-plasma interaction. A right-hand CP laser pulse can propagate almost without reflection into the cavity through a highly magnetized overdense H-plasma slab filling the entrance hole. The entrapped laser light is then multiply reflected at the inner surfaces of the slab and shell plasmas, gradually losing energy to the latter. Compared to that of the incident laser, the frequency is only slightly broadened and the wave vector slightly modified by appearance of weak nearly isotropic and homogeneous higher harmonics.
A numerically efficient framework that takes into account the effect of the Coulomb collision operator at arbitrary collisionalities is introduced. Such model is based on the expansion of the distribution function on a Hermite-Laguerre polynomial basis, to study the effects of collisions on magnetized plasma instabilities at arbitrary mean-free path. Focusing on the drift-wave instability, we show that our framework allows retrieving established collisional and collisionless limits. At the intermediate collisionalities relevant for present and future magnetic nuclear fusion devices, deviations with respect to collision operators used in state-of-the-art turbulence simulation codes show the need for retaining the full Coulomb operator in order to obtain both the correct instability growth rate and eigenmode spectrum, which, for example, may significantly impact quantitative predictions of transport. The exponential convergence of the spectral representation that we propose makes the representation of the velocity space dependence, including the full collision operator, more efficient than standard finite difference methods.