No Arabic abstract
Electrostatic structures have been observed in many regions of space plasmas, including the solar wind, the magnetosphere, the auroral acceleration region. One possible theoretical description of some of these structures is the concept of Bernstein-Greene-Kruskal (BGK) modes, which are exact nonlinear steady-state solutions of the Vlasov-Poisson system of equations in collisionless kinetic theory. We generalize exact solutions of two-dimensional BGK modes in a magnetized plasma with finite magnetic field strength [Ng, Bhattacharjee, and Skiff, Phys. Plasmas {bf13}, 055903 (2006)] to cases with azimuthal magnetic fields so that these structures carry electric current as well as steady electric and magnetic fields. Such nonlinear solutions now satisfy exactly the Vlasov-Poisson-Amp`{e}re system of equations. Explicit examples with either positive or negative electric potential structure are provided.
Inequality width-amplitude relations for three-dimensional Bernstein-Greene-Kruskal solitary waves are derived for magnetized plasmas. Criteria for neglecting effects of nonzero cyclotron radius are obtained. We emphasize that the form of the solitary potential is not tightly constrained, and the amplitude and widths of the potential are constrained by inequalities. The existence of a continuous range of allowed sizes and shapes for these waves makes them easily accessible. We propose that these solitary waves can be spontaneously generated in turbulence or thermal fluctuations. We expect that the high excitation probability of these waves should alter the bulk properties of the plasma medium such as electrical resistivity and thermal conductivity.
In the paper, gridless particle techniques are presented in order to solve problems involving electrostatic, collisionless plasmas. The method makes use of computational particles having the shape of spherical shells or of rings, and can be used to study cases in which the plasma has spherical or axial symmetry, respectively. As a computational grid is absent, the technique is particularly suitable when the plasma occupies a rapidly changing space region.
We review recent advances in the numerical analysis of the Monge-Amp`ere equation. Various computational techniques are discussed including wide-stencil finite difference schemes, two-scaled methods, finite element methods, and methods based on geometric considerations. Particular focus is the development of appropriate stability and consistency estimates which lead to rates of convergence of the discrete approximations. Finally we present numerical experiments which highlight each method for a variety of test problem with different levels of regularity.
We study Landau damping in the 1+1D Vlasov-Poisson system using a Fourier-Hermite spectral representation. We describe the propagation of free energy in phase space using forwards and backwards propagating Hermite modes recently developed for gyrokinetics [Schekochihin et al. (2014)]. The change in the electric field corresponds to the net Hermite flux via a free energy evolution equation. In linear Landau damping, decay in the electric field corresponds to forward propagating Hermite modes; in nonlinear damping, the initial decay is followed by a growth phase characterised by the generation of backwards propagating Hermite modes by the nonlinear term. The free energy content of the backwards propagating modes increases exponentially until balancing that of the forward propagating modes. Thereafter there is no systematic net Hermite flux, so the electric field cannot decay and the nonlinearity effectively suppresses Landau damping. These simulations are performed using the fully-spectral 5D gyrokinetics code SpectroGK [Parker et al. 2014], modified to solve the 1+1D Vlasov-Poisson system. This captures Landau damping via an iterated Lenard-Bernstein collision operator or via Hou-Li filtering in velocity space. Therefore the code is applicable even in regimes where phase-mixing and filamentation are dominant.
We construct (modified) scattering operators for the Vlasov-Poisson system in three dimensions, mapping small asymptotic dynamics as $tto -infty$ to asymptotic dynamics as $tto +infty$. The main novelty is the construction of modified wave operators, but we also obtain a new simple proof of modified scattering. Our analysis is guided by the Hamiltonian structure of the Vlasov-Poisson system. Via a pseudo-conformal inversion we recast the question of asymptotic behavior in terms of local in time dynamics of a new equation with singular coefficients which is approximately integrated using a generating function.