New insights into the decay of ion waves to turbulence, ion heating, and soliton generation
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, P.O. Box 808, Livermore, California 94551 (United States)
- Centre de Recherches en Physique des Plasmas, Association EURATOM-Confédération Suisse, Ecole Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne, CRPP-PPB, CH-1015 Lausanne (Switzerland)
The decay of a single-frequency, propagating ion acoustic wave (IAW) via two-ion wave decay to a continuum of IAW modes is found to result in a highly turbulent plasma, ion soliton production, and rapid ion heating. Instability growth rates, thresholds, and sensitivities to plasma conditions are studied via fully kinetic Vlasov simulations. The decay rate of IAWs is found to scale linearly with the fundamental IAW potential amplitude ϕ{sub 1} for ZT{sub e}/T{sub i}≲20, beyond which the instability is shown to scale with a higher power of ϕ{sub 1}, where Z is the ion charge number and T{sub e} (T{sub i}) is the electron (ion) thermal temperature. The threshold for instability is found to be smaller by an order of magnitude than linear theory estimates. Achieving a better understanding of the saturation of stimulated Brillouin scatter levels observed in laser-plasma interaction experiments is part of the motivation for this study.
- OSTI ID:
- 22253297
- Journal Information:
- Physics of Plasmas, Vol. 21, Issue 4; Other Information: (c) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1070-664X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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