On the nonlinear trapping nature of undamped, coherent structures in collisionless plasmas and its impact on stability

• Published in: Physics of plasmas Vol. 24; no. 3
• Main Authors: Schamel, Hans, Mandal, Debraj, Sharma, Devendra
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Melville American Institute of Physics 01.03.2017
• Subjects: Amplitudes; Coherence; Collisionless plasmas; Current carrying plasmas; Fluid dynamics; Fluid flow; Forging; Nonlinearity; Plasma; Plasma physics; Plasma turbulence; Stability; Stability analysis; Trapping; Variation
• ISSN: 1070-664X; 1089-7674
• DOI: 10.1063/1.4978477

An outstanding notion for collisionless plasmas is the essential nonlinear character of their coherent structures, which in the stationary, weak amplitude limit are described by a continuum of cnoidal electron and ion hole modes governed by a multiparametric nonlinear dispersion relation. The well-known discrete structure of undamped linear plasma modes is seamlessly embedded in this nonlinear continuum as the microscopic texture of plasma begins to reveal itself in the high temperature collisionless plasma limit. This transforms the linear-threshold-based operating mechanism of plasma turbulence into a fundamental nonlinear, multifaceted one. Based on a comprehensive three-level description of increasing profundity, a proof of this novel dictum is presented, which makes use of the joint properties of such structures, their coherency and stationarity, and uses in succession a fluid, linear Vlasov and a full Vlasov description. It unifies discrete and continuum limits by resolving the inevitable resonant region and shows that coherent electrostatic equilibria are generally controlled by kinetic particle trapping and are hence fundamentally nonlinear. By forging a link between damped and growing wave solutions, these modes render plasma stability complex and difficult to evaluate due to the entangled pattern of the stability boundary in function and parameter space, respectively. A direct consequence is the existence of negative energy modes of arbitrarily small amplitudes in the subcritical region of the two-stream instability as well as the failure of linear Landau (Vlasov, van Kampen) theory, whenever resonant particles are involved, in addressing the onset of instability in a current-carrying plasma. Responsible for this subtle phase space behavior is hence the thresholdless omnipresence of the trapping nonlinearity originating from coherency. A high resolution, exact-mass-ratio, multispecies, and collisionless plasma simulation is employed to illustrate exemplarily how tiny seed fluctuations in phase-space can act as a triggering agent for a subcritical plasma excitation verifying an access to these modes in the noisy, collisionless plasma limit.