Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 859, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aabe92
Keywords
instabilities; methods: numerical; plasmas; relativistic processes; waves
Categories
Funding
- Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Government of Canada through Industry Canada
- Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Research and Innovation
- NSF [AST-1255469]
- European Research Council under ERC-CoG grant [CRAGSMAN-646955]
- Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship
- NASA ATP Grant [NNX14AH35G]
- NSF Collaborative Research Grant [411920]
- CAREER grant [1455342]
- Kavli Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We explore how inhomogeneity in the background plasma number density alters the growth of electrostatic unstable wavemodes of beam-plasma systems. This is particularly interesting for blazar-driven beam-plasma instabilities, which may be suppressed by inhomogeneities in the intergalactic medium (IGM) as was recently claimed in the literature. Using high-resolution particle-in-cell simulations with the SHARP code, we show that the growth of the instability is local, i.e., regions with almost homogeneous background density will support the growth of the Langmuir waves even when they are separated by strongly inhomogeneous regions, resulting in an overall slower growth of the instability. We also show that if the background density is continuously varying, the growth rate of the instability is lower, although in all cases the system remains within the linear regime longer and the instability is not extinguished. In all cases, the beam loses approximately the same fraction of its initial kinetic energy in comparison to the uniform case at nonlinear saturation. Thus, inhomogeneities in the IGM are unlikely to suppress the growth of blazar-driven beam-plasma instabilities.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available