Autoresonant excitation of space-time quasicrystals in plasma

Vadim R. Munirov*, Lazar Friedland, Jonathan S. Wurtele

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

We demonstrate theoretically and numerically that a warm fluid model of a plasma supports space-time quasicrystalline structures. These structures are highly nonlinear, two-phase, ion acoustic waves that are excited autoresonantly when the plasma is driven by two small amplitude chirped-frequency ponderomotive drives. The waves exhibit density excursions that substantially exceed the equilibrium plasma density. Remarkably, these extremely nonlinear waves persist even when the small amplitude drives are turned off. We derive the weakly nonlinear analytical theory by applying Whitham's averaged variational principle to the Lagrangian formulation of the fluid equations. The resulting system of coupled weakly nonlinear equations is shown to be in good agreement with fully nonlinear simulations of the warm fluid model. The analytical conditions and thresholds required for autoresonant excitation to occur are derived and compared to simulations. The weakly nonlinear theory guides and informs numerical study of how the two-phase quasicrystalline structure "melts"into a single phase traveling wave when one drive is below a threshold. These nonlinear structures may have applications to plasma photonics for extremely intense laser pulses, which are limited by the smallness of density perturbations of linear waves.

Original languageEnglish
Article number023150
JournalPhysical Review Research
Volume4
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.

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