Stochastic electron dynamics due to drift waves in a sheared magnetic field and other drift-motion problems

Thesis/Dissertation · Wed Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 1986

OSTI ID:5303473

Robertson, J A

Electron motion in a single electrostatic wave in a sheared magnetic field is shown to become stochastic in the presence of a second wave at an amplitude well below the obtained from the overlapping pendulum resonance approximation. The enhanced stochasticity occurs for low parallel-velocity electrons for which the parallel trapping motion from eE/sub ll/m interacts strongly with the E x B trapping motion due to the presence of magnetic shear. The guiding-center equations for single-particle electron orbits in given fields are investigated using both analytical and numerical techniques. The model assumes a slab magnetic field geometry with shear and two electrostatic plane waves propagating at an angle with respect to each other. Collisions and the self-consistent effect of the electron motion upon the fields are ignored. The guiding-center motion in an inertial reference frame moving in phase with the two waves is given by a two degree-of-freedom, autonomous Hamiltonian system. The single-wave particle motion may reduce to a two-parameter family of one degree-of-freedom Hamiltonians which bifurcate from a pendulum phase space to a topology with three chains of elliptic and hyperbolic fixed points separated in radius about the mode-rational surface

• Research Organization: Texas Univ., Austin (USA)
• OSTI ID: 5303473
• Resource Relation: Other Information: Thesis (Ph. D.)
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS
75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS
SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND SUPERFLUIDITY
ELECTRON DRIFT
MAGNETIC FIELDS
PLASMA WAVES
GUIDING-CENTER APPROXIMATION
ORBITS
PHASE SPACE
STOCHASTIC PROCESSES
MATHEMATICAL SPACE
SPACE
430200* - Particle Accelerators- Beam Dynamics
Field Calculations
& Ion Optics
640430 - Fluid Physics- Magnetohydrodynamics