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P: Fachverband Plasmaphysik

P 18: Poster: Theorie/Modellierung

P 18.28: Poster

Wednesday, April 1, 2009, 17:30–19:30, Foyer des IfP

Weibel instability of a relativistic electron beam in quasi-neutral plasma — •Anupam Karmakar¹, Naveen Kumar², Alexander Pukhov², Oleg Polomarov³, and Gennady Shvets³ — ¹Institute for Advanced Simulation, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, D-52425, Germany — ²Institut für Theoretische Physik I, Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf, D-40225, Germany — ³Institute for Fusion Studies, University of Texas at Austin, One University Station, Austin, TX 78712, USA

A new model describing the Weibel instability of a relativistic electron beam propagating through a resistive plasma is developed. For finite-temperature beams, a new class of negative energy magneto-sound waves is identified, whose growth due to collisional dissipation destabilizes the beam-plasma system even for high beam temperatures. We perform 2D and 3D particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations to study the filamentary structures and associated electromagnetic fields and show that in 3D geometry, the Weibel instability persists even for collisionless background plasma. The effects of beam temperature and collisions on the filamentary structures generated in 3D simulations have distinctly been examined. The anomalous plasma resistivity in 3D is caused by the two-stream instability.