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Register a new userRole of electron inertia and electron/ion finite Larmor radius effects in low-beta, magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor instability
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The magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor (MRT) instability has been investigated in great detail in previous work using magnetohydrodynamic and kinetic models for low-beta plasmas. The work presented here extends previous studies of this instability to regimes where finite-Larmor-Radius (FLR) effects may be important. Comparisons of the MRT instability are made using a 5-moment and a 10-moment two-fluid model, the two fluids being ions and electrons. The 5-moment model includes Hall stabilization whereas the 10-moment model includes Hall and FLR stabilization. Results are presented for these two models using different electron mass to understand the role of electron inertia in the late-time nonlinear evolution of the MRT instability. For the 5-moment model, the late-time nonlinear MRT evolution does not significantly depend on the electron inertia. However, when FLR stabilization is important, the 10-moment results show that a lower ion-to-electron mass ratio (i.e. larger electron inertia) under-predicts the energy in high-wavenumber modes due to larger FLR stabilization.
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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.
While electron kinetic effects are well known to be of fundamental importance in several situations, the electron mean-flow inertia is often neglected when lengthscales below the electron skin depth become irrelevant. This has led to the formulation of different reduced models, where electron inertia terms are discarded while retaining some or all kinetic effects. Upon considering general full-orbit particle trajectories, this paper compares the dispersion relations emerging from such models in the case of the Weibel instability. As a result, the question of how lengthscales below the electron skin depth can be neglected in a kinetic treatment emerges as an unsolved problem, since all current theories suffer from drawbacks of different nature. Alternatively, we discuss fully kinetic theories that remove all these drawbacks by restricting to frequencies well below the plasma frequency of both ions and electrons. By giving up on the lengthscale restrictions appearing in previous works, these models are obtained by assuming quasi-neutrality in the full Maxwell-Vlasov system.
We propose using a directional time-varying (rotating) driving magnetic field to suppress magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor (MRT) instability in dynamic Z-pinches. A rotational drive magnetic field is equivalent to two magnetic-field components, {Theta} and Z, that alternate in time, referred to as an alternate Theta-Z-pinch configuration. We consider the finitely thick cylindrical liner configuration in this paper. We numerically integrate the perturbation equation to stagnation time based on the optimal background unperturbed trajectories. We assess the cumulative growth of the dominant mode selected by some mechanism at the beginning of an implosion. The maximum e-folding number at stagnation of the dominant mode of an optimized alternate Theta-Z-pinch is significantly lower than that of the standard Theta- or Z-pinch. The directional rotation of the magnetic field contributes to suppress the instabilities, independent of the finite thickness. The finite thickness effect plays a role only when the orientation of the magnetic field varies in time whereas it does not appear in the standard Theta- or Z-pinch. The rotating frequency of the magnetic field and the thickness of liner are both having a monotonic effect on suppression. Their synergistic effect can enhance the suppression on MRT instability. Because the MRT instability can be well suppressed in this way, the alternate Theta-Z-pinch configuration has potential applications in liner inertial fusion. This work is supported by the NSFC (Grant Nos. 11405167, 51407171, 11571293, 11605188, and 11605189) and the Foundation of the China Academy of Engineering Physics (No. 2015B0201023).
Finite Larmor radius (FLR) effects on non-diffusive transport in a prototypical zonal flow with drift waves are studied in the context of a simplified chaotic transport model. The model consists of a superposition of drift waves of the linearized Hasegawa-Mima equation and a zonal shear flow perpendicular to the density gradient. High frequency FLR effects are incorporated by gyroaveraging the ExB velocity. Transport in the direction of the density gradient is negligible and we therefore focus on transport parallel to the zonal flows. A prescribed asymmetry produces strongly asymmetric non- Gaussian PDFs of particle displacements, with Levy flights in one direction but not the other. For zero Larmor radius, a transition is observed in the scaling of the second moment of particle displacements. However, FLR effects seem to eliminate this transition. The PDFs of trapping and flight events show clear evidence of algebraic scaling with decay exponents depending on the value of the Larmor radii. The shape and spatio-temporal self-similar anomalous scaling of the PDFs of particle displacements are reproduced accurately with a neutral, asymmetric effective fractional diffusion model.
It is shown that in low-beta, weakly collisional plasmas, such as the solar corona, some instances of the solar wind, the aurora, inner regions of accretion discs, their coronae, and some laboratory plasmas, Alfvenic fluctuations produce no ion heating within the gyrokinetic approximation, i.e., as long as their amplitudes (at the Larmor scale) are small and their frequencies stay below the ion Larmor frequency (even as their spatial scales can be above or below the ion Larmor scale). Thus, all low-frequency ion heating in such plasmas is due to compressive fluctuations (slow modes). Because these fluctuations energetically decouple from the Alfvenic ones already in the inertial range, the above conclusion means that the energy partition between ions and electrons in low-beta plasmas is decided at the outer scale, where turbulence is launched, and can be determined from magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) models of the relevant astrophysical systems. Any additional ion heating must come from non-gyrokinetic mechanisms such as cyclotron heating or the stochastic heating owing to distortions of ions Larmor orbits. An exception to these conclusions occurs in the Hall limit, i.e., when the ratio of the ion to electron temperatures is as low as the ion beta (equivalently, the electron beta is order unity). In this regime, slow modes couple to Alfvenic ones well above the Larmor scale (viz., at the ion inertial or ion sound scale), so the Alfvenic and compressive cascades join and then separate again into two cascades of fluctuations that linearly resemble kinetic Alfven and ion cyclotron waves, with the former heating electrons and the latter ions. The two cascades are shown to decouple, scalings for them are derived, and it is argued physically that the two species will be heated by them at approximately equal rates.
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