Standing autoresonant plasma waves

L. Friedland*, A. G. Shagalov

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

The formation and control of strongly nonlinear standing plasma waves (SPWs) from a trivial equilibrium by a chirped frequency drive are discussed. If the drive amplitude exceeds a threshold, after passage through the linear resonance in this system, the excited wave preserves the phase locking with the drive, yielding a controlled growth of the wave amplitude. We illustrate these autoresonant waves via Vlasov-Poisson simulations, showing the formation of sharply peaked excitations with local electron density maxima significantly exceeding the unperturbed plasma density. The Whitham averaged variational approach applied to a simplified water bag model yields the weakly nonlinear evolution of the autoresonant SPWs and the autoresonance threshold. If the chirped driving frequency approaches some constant level, the driven SPW saturates at a target amplitude, avoiding the kinetic wave breaking.

Original languageEnglish
Article number820000380
JournalJournal of Plasma Physics
Volume86
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 2020

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press.

Keywords

  • plasma nonlinear phenomena
  • plasma simulation
  • plasma waves

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