Nonlinear Landau damping in mirror plasmas
Abstract
The well known drift cyclotron loss cone (DCLC) mode is shown to couple nonlinearity to a low frequency stable Rayleigh-Taylor mode through the process of nonlinear Landau damping. When the DCLC mode is linearly marginally stable, this coupling leads to an explosive instability, the time scale for which is in some agreement with the experimentally observed time between individual spikes of ion cyclotron radiation.
- Publication:
-
Unknown
- Pub Date:
- February 1978
- Bibcode:
- 1978nldm.rept.....N
- Keywords:
-
- Ion Cyclotron Radiation;
- Landau Damping;
- Plasma Waves;
- Coupling Coefficients;
- Mathematical Models;
- Nonlinearity;
- Plasmas (Physics);
- Stability;
- Plasma Physics