No Arabic abstract
Langmuir waves (LWs), which are believed to play a crucial role in the plasma emission of solar radio bursts, can be excited by streaming instability of energetic electron beams. However, solar hard X-ray observations imply that the energetic flare electrons usually have a power-law energy distribution with a lower energy cutoff. In this paper, we investigate LWs driven by the power-law electrons. The results show that power-law electrons with the steepness cutoff behavior can excite LWs effectively because of the population inversion distribution below the cutoff energy ($E_c$). The growth rate of LWs increases with the steepness index ($delta$) and decreases with the power-law index ($alpha$). The wave number of the fastest growing LWs ($klambda_D$), decreases with the characteristic velocity of the power-law electrons ($v_{c}=sqrt{2E_{c}/m_{e}}$) and increases with the thermal velocity of ambient electrons ($v_T$). This can be helpful for us to understand better the physics of LWs and the dynamics of energetic electron beams in space and astrophysical plasmas.
The direct current (DC) electric field near the reconnection region has been proposed as an effective mechanism to accelerate protons and electrons in solar flares. A power-law energy spectrum was generally claimed in the simulations of electron acceleration by the reconnection electric field. However in most of the literature, the electric and magnetic fields were chosen independently. In this paper, we perform test-particle simulations of electron acceleration in a reconnecting magnetic field, where both the electric and magnetic fields are adopted from numerical simulations of the MHD equations. It is found that the accelerated electrons present a truncated power-law energy spectrum with an exponential tail at high energies, which is analogous to the case of diffusive shock acceleration. The influences of reconnection parameters on the spectral feature are also investigated, such as the longitudinal and transverse components of the magnetic field and the size of the current sheet. It is suggested that the DC electric field alone might not be able to reproduce the observed single or double power-law distributions.
The universal power law for the spectrum of one-dimensional breaking Riemann waves is justified for the simple wave equation. The spectrum of spatial amplitudes at the breaking time $t = t_b$ has an asymptotic decay of $k^{-4/3}$, with corresponding energy spectrum decaying as $k^{-8/3}$. This spectrum is formed by the singularity of the form $(x-x_b)^{1/3}$ in the wave shape at the breaking time. This result remains valid for arbitrary nonlinear wave speed. In addition, we demonstrate numerically that the universal power law is observed for long time in the range of small wave numbers if small dissipation or dispersion is accounted in the viscous Burgers or Korteweg-de Vries equations.
Five-minutes oscillations is one of the basic properties of solar convection. Observations show mixture of a large number of acoustic wave fronts propagating from their sources. We investigate the process of acoustic waves excitation from the point of view of individual events, by using realistic 3D radiative hydrodynamic simulation of the quiet Sun. The results show that the excitation events are related to dynamics vortex tubes (or swirls) in the intergranular lanes. These whirlpool-like flows are characterized by very strong horizontal velocities (7 - 11 km/s) and downflows (~ 7 km/s), and are accompanied by strong decreases of the temperature, density and pressure at the surface and in a ~ 0.5-1 Mm deep layer below the surface. High-speed whirlpool flows can attract and capture other vortices. According to our simulation results, the processes of the vortex interaction, such as vortex annihilation, can cause the excitation of acoustic waves.
A possible solution to the unexplained high intensity hard x-ray (HXR) emission observable during solar flares was investigated via 3D fully relativistic, electromagnetic particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations with realistic ion to electron mass ratio. A beam of accelerated electrons was injected into a magnetised, Maxwellian, homogeneous and inhomogeneous background plasma. The electron distribution function was unstable to the beam-plasma instability and was shown to generate Langmuir waves, while relaxing to plateau formation. In order to estimate the role of the background density gradient on an unbound (infinite spatial extent) beam, three different scenarios were investigated: a) a uniform density background; b) a weak density gradient, n_R/n_L=3; c) a strong gradient case, n_R/n_L=10, where n_R and n_L denote background electron densities on the left and right edges of the simulation box respectively. The strong gradient case produced the largest fraction of electrons beyond 15 v_th. Further, two cases (uniform and strong gradient background) with spatially localized beam injections were performed aiming to show drifts of the generated Langmuir wave wavenumbers, as suggested in previous studies. For the strong gradient case, the Langmuir wave power is shown to drift to smaller wavenumbers, as found in previous quasi-linear simulations.
We show that Brownian motion of a one-dimensional domain wall in a large but finite system yields a $omega^{-3/2}$ power spectrum. This is successfully applied to the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) with open boundaries. An excellent agreement between our theory and numerical results is obtained in a frequency range where the domain wall motion dominates and discreteness of the system is not effective.