Explosion Debris-Driven Electromagnetic Ion-Ion Beam Instabilities

We use a hybrid (fluid electrons + kinetic ions) version of the particle-in-cell code VPIC to analyze electromagnetic ion-ion beam instabilities driven by super-Alfvenic debris streaming parallel to the magnetic field from a localized explosion. The explosion of ionized debris into a background magnetized plasma occurs in toastrophysical systems such as supernovae, space contexts including magnetospheric chemical release experiments, and laboratory experiments driven by laser ablation [see 1 and references therein]. In collisionless systems, debris streaming parallel to the magnetic field couples to the background through resonant and non-resonant ion-ion beam instabilities [2]. Based on the instability growth rates and 1D & 2D hybrid simulations of nonlinear saturation, we estimate the amount of debris required to generate a quasi-parallel shock in the laboratory [3]. 

[1] Winske et al., Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, 5, 51 (2019).

[2] Weidl et al., The Astrophysical Journal, 873(1), 57 (2019).

[3] Heuer et al., Physics of Plasmas, 27(4), 042103 (2020).