Saturation of the Non-Resonant Cosmic Ray Streaming Instability

ORAL

Abstract

We perform both fully-kinetic and hybrid (kinetic protons-fluid electrons) plasma simulations to study the saturated amplified magnetic fields produced by the non-resonant (or Bell) instability driven by energetic particles (cosmic rays, CRs). Using a survey of 1D, 2D and 3D simulations, we connect initial plasma and CR parameters to the strength of the magnetic fields at saturation. A simple analytic theory is derived for such a saturation, which agrees well with the simulations. These results are important for understanding CR acceleration and transport in astrophysical systems, as well as beam-driven instabilities in laboratory experiments.

*Simulations were performed on computational resources provided by the University of Chicago Research Computing Center and XSEDE TACC (TG-AST180008). DC was partially supported by NASA (grants NNX17AG30G, 80NSSC18K1218, and 80NSSC18K1726) and by NSF (grants AST-1714658, AST-1909778, and PHY-2010240).

Authors

  • Siddhartha Gupta

    • University of Chicago
  • Georgios Zacharegkas

    • University of Chicago
  • Colby Haggerty

    • University of Chicago
    • University of Hawaii
  • Damiano Caprioli

    • University of Chicago