No Arabic abstract
Dynamic mitigation is presented for filamentation instability and magnetic reconnection in a plasm driven by a wobbling electron sheet current. The wobbling current introduces an oscillating perturbation and smooths the perturbation. The sheet current creates an anti-parallel magnetic field in plasma. The initial small perturbation induces the electron beam filamentation and the magnetic reconnection. When the wobbling or oscillation motion is added to the sheet electron beam along the sheet current surface, the perturbation phase is mixed and consequently the instability growth is delayed remarkably. Normally plasma instabilities are discussed by the growth rate, because it would be difficult to measure or detect the phase of the perturbations in plasmas. However, the phase of perturbation can be controlled externally, for example, by the driver wobbling motion. The superimposition of perturbations introduced actively results in the perturbation smoothing, and the instability growth can be reduced, like feed-forward control.
A dynamic mitigation mechanism of the two-stream instability is discussed based on a phase control for plasma and fluid instabilities. The basic idea for the dynamic mitigation mechanism by the phase control was proposed in the paper [Phys. Plasmas 19, 024503(2012)]. The mitigation method is applied to the two-stream instability in this paper. In general, instabilities appear from the perturbations, and normally the perturbation phase is unknown. Therefore, the instability growth rate is discussed in fluids and plasmas. However, if the perturbation phase is known, the instability growth can be controlled by a superimposition of perturbations imposed actively. For instance, a perturbed driver induces a perturbation to fluids or plasmas; if the perturbation induced by the perturbed driver is oscillated actively by the driver oscillation, the perturbation phase is known and the perturbation amplitude can be controlled, like a feedforward control. The application result shown in this paper demonstrates that the dynamic mitigation mechanism works well to smooth the non-uniformities and mitigate the instabilities in plasmas.
We report for the first time the intrinsically three-dimensional (3D) geometry of the magnetic reconnection process induced by ballooning instability in a generalized Harris sheet. The spatial distribution and structure of the quasi-separatrix layers, as well as their temporal emergence and evolution, indicate that the associated magnetic reconnection can only occur in a 3D geometry, which is irreducible to that of any two-dimensional reconnection process. Such a finding provides a new perspective to the long-standing controversy over the substorm onset problem, and elucidates the combined roles of reconnection and ballooning instabilities. It also connects to the universal presence of 3D reconnection processes previously discovered in various natural and laboratory plasmas.
We present experimental measurements of the femtosecond time-scale generation of strong magnetic-field fluctuations during the interaction of ultrashort, moderately relativistic laser pulses with solid targets. These fields were probed using low-emittance, highly relativistic electron bunches from a laser wakefield accelerator, and a line-integrated $B$-field of $2.70 pm 0.39,rm kT,mu m$ was measured. Three-dimensional, fully relativistic particle-in-cell simulations indicate that such fluctuations originate from a Weibel-type current filamentation instability developing at submicron scales around the irradiated target surface, and that they grow to amplitudes strong enough to broaden the angular distribution of the probe electron bunch a few tens of femtoseconds after the laser pulse maximum. Our results highlight the potential of wakefield-accelerated electron beams for ultrafast probing of relativistic laser-driven phenomena.
We study, by means of MHD simulations, the onset and evolution of fast reconnection via the ideal tearing mode within a collapsing current sheet at high Lundquist numbers ($Sgg10^4$). We first confirm that as the collapse proceeds, fast reconnection is triggered well before a Sweet-Parker type configuration can form: during the linear stage plasmoids rapidly grow in a few Alfven times when the predicted ideal tearing threshold $S^{-1/3}$ is approached from above; after the linear phase of the initial instability, X-points collapse and reform nonlinearly. We show that these give rise to a hierarchy of tearing events repeating faster and faster on current sheets at ever smaller scales, corresponding to the triggering of ideal tearing at the renormalized Lundquist number. In resistive MHD this process should end with the formation of sub-critical ($S leq10^4$) Sweet Parker sheets at microscopic scales. We present a simple model describing the nonlinear recursive evolution which explains the timescale of the disruption of the initial sheet.
Two counter-propagating cool and equally dense electron beams are modelled with particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. The electron beam filamentation instability is examined in one spatial dimension, which is an approximation for a quasi-planar filament boundary. It is confirmed, that the force on the electrons imposed by the electrostatic field, which develops during the nonlinear stage of the instability, oscillates around a mean value that equals the magnetic pressure gradient force. The forces acting on the electrons due to the electrostatic and the magnetic field have a similar strength. The electrostatic field reduces the confining force close to the stable equilibrium of each filament and increases it farther away, limiting the peak density. The confining time-averaged total potential permits an overlap of current filaments with an opposite flow direction.