A water bag theory of autoresonant Bernstein-Greene-Kruskal modes

P. Khain*, L. Friedland

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

The adiabatic water bag theory describing formation and passage through phase-space of driven, continuously phase-locked (autoresonant) coherent structures in plasmas [L. Friedland, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 225001 (2006)] and of the associated Bernstein-Greene-Kruskal (BGK) modes is developed. The phase-locking is achieved by using a chirped frequency ponderomotive drive, passing through kinetic Čerenkov-type resonances. The theory uses the adiabatic invariants (conserved actions of limiting trajectories) in the problem and, for a flat-top initial distribution of the electrons, reduces the calculation of the self-field of the driven BGK mode to solution of a few algebraic equations. The adiabatic multiwater bag extension of the theory for applications to autoresonant BGK structures with more general initial distributions is suggested. The results of the theories are in very good agreement with numerical simulations.

Original languageEnglish
Article number082110
JournalPhysics of Plasmas
Volume14
Issue number8
DOIs
StatePublished - 2007

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