SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “collisionless plasma”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

SourceResearch connectionFrom yearThrough year

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 793 records · Page 44

All sources NASA NTRS DOE OSTI

NASA NTRS1972

Stability of a steady, large amplitude whistler wave.

Study of the behavior of weak electrostatic waves in a collisionless magnetoplasma supporting a steady large amplitude whistler wave. All waves are assumed to propagate parallel to a uniform background magnetic field B sub zero. In the presence of the whistler wave fields each particle executes an oscillatory motion parallel to B sub zero, in addition to a translation along B sub zero and transverse motions. This oscillation causes the Landau resonance to be replaced by a series of new resonances between particles and the electrostatic modes. A distribution function for the perturbed plasma is constructed by solving the Vlasov equation, linearized in the electrostatic wave amplitudes. A dispersion relation is obtained and solved approximately for the growth/damping rate of the perturbations. Growing electrostatic modes are found to be approximately uncoupled. Trapped particles have a strong influence on the stability of the system.

Palmadesso, P. J.↗

NASA NTRS2021

Oblique High Mach Number Heliospheric Shocks: The Role of α Particles

Spacecraft observations of heliospheric shocks often find oscillations in the magnetic field and density both, upstream and downstream. The downstream magnetic oscillations of oblique collisionless shocks were detected by Wind with 10.9 samples/s and DSCOVR spacecraft with high temporal resolution of 50 samples/s. The density oscillations associated with the shocks are also evident in proton and α particle density by Wind (with much lower temporal resolution). Recently, we have investigated low Mach number low-β oblique shock oscillations using satellite data and 2.5D hybrid modeling with electrons modeled as fluid and ions modeled as particles and found that α particles—an important component of heliospheric plasma—may affect considerably the downstream oscillations and the shock structure. The objective of the present study is to investigate the effects of α particles on high Mach number heliospheric shocks dynamics, oscillations, nonstationarity, and shock-front rippling. We extend the study to high Mach number shocks (M > 3), investigate several α particle typical densities, and compare the results for the various shock parameters. We model the effects of α particles on the shock ramp, wake, and downstream oscillation structure and the kinetic properties of proton and α particle velocity distributions at various locations downstream of the shocks. Using the 2.5D hybrid model we found that the modeled high Mach number quasi-perpendicular shock magnetic and density structures are significantly affected by α particles with typical solar wind relative abundances, suggesting that the observed high Mach number shocks are similarly affected by α particles.

Leon Ofman↗

NASA NTRS1991

Linear theory of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in the low-latitude boundary layer

The feasibility is examined of establishing characteristic profiles across the magnetospheric low-latitude boundary layer for the Kelvin-Helmholtz mode so that these profiles can be compared with satellite observations or a latitudinal chain of ground stations. An anisotropic collisionless fluid model is used instead of conventional MHD, and the finite thickness of the boundary layer and the thickness and position of the current layer are taken into account. The instability is found to be enhanced by a decrease in the thickness of the shear layer and of the current layer and by the proximity of the 'current layer' to the outer edge of the shear layer. The velocity threshold for the onset of instability is insensitive to the thickness. Characteristic profiles of the variation of plasma and field parameters across the boundary are obtained, and the importance of parameters specifying the current layer position and thickness is demonstrated.

Rajaram, R.↗

NASA NTRS1985

Acceleration of greater than 47 keV ions and greater than 2 keV electrons by interplanetary shocks at 1 AU

It is pointed out that collisionless shocks may be responsible for much of the particle acceleration which occurs in the interplanetary medium. The present investigation is concerned with the conditions for acceleration of particles by interplanetary shocks near 1 AU. Interplanetary shocks near 1 AU have large scale sizes, radii of curvature on the order of 1 AU, or about 1000 times the size of the earth's bow shock. At the considered heliocentric distance the shocks are primarily associated with solar flares and/or solar coronal transients. Observations of magnetic fields, solar wind plasma, and energetic ions and electrons from the ISEE 3 spacecraft are used to study the interplanetary shocks occurring in the period from launch in August 1978 through November 1979. Attention is given to the method of analysis, the determination of the normal to the shock, and energetic particle results.

Tsurutani, B. T.↗

NASA NTRS1988

A description of electron heating with an electrostatic potential jump in a parallel, collisionless, fire hose shock

The electron heating required if protons scatter elastically in a parallel, collisionless shock is calculated. Near-elastic proton scattering off large amplitude background magnetic field fluctuations might be expected if the waves responsible for the shock dissipation are generated by the fire hose instability. The effects of an electrostatic potential jump in the shock layer are included by assuming that the energy lost by protons in traversing the potential jump is converted into electron thermal pressure. It is found that the electron temperature increase is a strong function of the potential jump. Comparison is made to the parallel shock plasma simulation of Quest (1987).

Ellison, Donald C.↗

NASA NTRS1991

Densities and abundances of hot cometary ions in the coma of P/Halley

On its flight by P/Halley, the Giotto spacecraft carried a High Energy Range Spectrometer (HERS) for measuring the properties of cometary ions picked up by the solar wind in the nearly collisionless regions of the coma. Preliminary estimates of the ion densities observed by HERS were reevaluated and extended; density profiles along the Giotto trajectory are presented for 13 values of ion mass/charge. Comparison with the physical-chemical model of the interaction of sunlight and the solar wind with the comet by other researchers reveals that, with the exception of protons and H2(+), all ion densities were at least an order of magnitude higher than predicted. The high ion densities cannot be explained on the basis of compression of the plasma, but require additional or stronger ionization mechanisms. Ratios of the densities of different ion species reveal an overabundance of carbonaceous material and an underabundance of H2(+) compared to the predictions of the Schmidt. While the densities of solar wind ions (H(+) and He(++)) changed sharply across a magnetic discontinuity located 1.35(10)(exp 5) km from the comet, this feature, which has been called both the 'cometopause' and the 'magnetic pileup boundary' was barely distinguishable in the density profiles of hot cometary ions. This result is consistent with the interpretation that the magnetic pileup boundary detected by Giotto was caused by a discontinuity in the solar wind and is not an intrinsic feature of the interaction of the solar wind with an active comet.

Neugebauer, M.↗

NASA NTRS2011

First Observations of a Foreshock Bubble at Earth: Implications for Magnetospheric Activity and Energetic Particle Acceleration

Earth?s foreshock, which is the quasi-parallel region upstream of the bow shock, is a unique plasma region capable of generating several kinds of large-scale phenomena, each of which can impact the magnetosphere resulting in global effects. Interestingly, such phenomena have also been observed at planetary foreshocks throughout our solar system. Recently, a new type of foreshock phenomena has been predicted: foreshock bubbles, which are large-scale disruptions of both the foreshock and incident solar wind plasmas that can result in global magnetospheric disturbances. Here we present unprecedented, multi-point observations of foreshock bubbles at Earth using a combination of spacecraft and ground observations primarily from the Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) mission, and we include detailed analysis of the events? global effects on the magnetosphere and the energetic ions and electrons accelerated by them, potentially by a combination of first and second order Fermi and shock drift acceleration processes. This new phenomena should play a role in energetic particle acceleration at collisionless, quasi-parallel shocks throughout the Universe.

Turner, D. L.↗

NASA NTRS2012

The Impact of Geometrical Constraints on Collisionless Magnetic Reconnection

One of the most often cited features associated with collisionless magnetic reconnection is a Hall-type magnetic field, which leads, in antiparallel geometries, to a quadrupolar magnetic field signature. The combination of this out of plane magnetic field with the reconnection in-plane magnetic field leads to angling of magnetic flux tubes out of the plane defined by the incoming magnetic flux. Because it is propagated by Whistler waves, the quadrupolar field can extend over large distances in relatively short amounts of time - in fact, it will extend to the boundary of any modeling domain. In reality, however, the surrounding plasma and magnetic field geometry, defined, for example, by the overall solar wind flow, will in practice limit the extend over which a flux tube can be angled out of the main plain. This poses the question to what extent geometric constraints limit or control the reconnection process and this is the question investigated in this presentation. The investigation will involve a comparison of calculations, where open boundary conditions are set up to mimic either free or constrained geometries. We will compare momentum transport, the geometry of the reconnection regions, and the acceleration if ions and electrons to provide the current sheet in the outflow jet.

Hesse, Michael↗

NASA NTRS1993

Collisionless shock structures of Earth and other planets

This report summarizes the closing segment of our multi-spacecraft, multi-instrument study of collisionless shock structure. In this last year of our study, we have necessarily concentrated on subjects that limited time and remaining resources could be expected to bring to reasonable stopping points, if not full conclusions. Our attention has been focused therefore on matters that were either well underway when the year began or that could be expected to yield rapidly completed reports publishable quickly in abbreviated versions. Contemporary publication delays prevent any new initiatives from reaching the literature within the year in the best of circumstances. The topics that fell into these categories were detailed plasma wave (pw) phenomenology in slow shocks in the Earth's distant geomagnetic tail, instantaneous orientations of theta(sub Bn) in quasiparallel (Q(sub parallel)) shock structure, and a comprehensive overview of the relationship between structural ULF waves in the Qll shock environment and waves in the magnetosphere, i.e. geomagnetic ULF pulsations. The remainder of this report describes our freshly completed results, discusses two related investigations of pw waves in the foreshock and magnetosheath, and appends the abstracts of published papers and the texts of papers in press.

Greenstadt, Eugene W.↗

DOE OSTI2023

Required toroidal confinement for fusion and omnigeneity

Deuterium–tritium (DT) burning requires a long energy confinement times compared to collision times, so the particle distribution functions must approximate local Maxwellians. Non-equilibrium thermodynamics is applicable, which gives relations among transport, entropy production, the collision frequency, and the deviation from a Maxwellian. The distribution functions are given by the Fokker–Planck equation, which is an advection–diffusion equation. A large hyperbolic operator, the Vlasov operator with the particle trajectories as its characteristics, equals a small diffusive operator, the collision operator. The collisionless particle trajectories would be chaotic in stellarators without careful optimization. This would lead to rapid entropy production and transport—far beyond what is consistent with a self-sustaining DT burn. Omnigeneity is the weakest general condition that is consistent with a sufficiently small entropy production associated with the thermal particle trajectories. Omnigeneity requires that the contours of constant magnetic field strength be unbounded in at least one of the two angular coordinates in magnetic surfaces and that there be a symmetry in the field-strength wells along the field lines. Even in omnigenous plasmas, fluctuations due to microturbulence can produce chaotic particle trajectories and the gyro-Bohm transport is seen in many stellarator and tokamak experiments. The higher the plasma temperature above 10 keV, the smaller the transport must be compared to gyro-Bohm for a self-sustaining DT burn. The hot alphas of DT fusion heat the electrons. When the ion–electron equilibration time is long compared to the ion energy confinement time, a self-sustaining DT burn is not possible, which sets a limit on the electron temperature.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

NASA NTRS1981

Large loop thermal models of solar hard X-ray bursts

Results for small loop thermal models of hard X-ray bursts are extended to large loops. In this model a magnetic arch with a coronal length of 45,000 km has the electrons near the top heated to temperatures above 1 billion K. The resulting conduction fronts which form are dominated by collisionless processes and travel down the arch to the transition region and chromosphere where they evaporate off part of the latter. This relatively cool material travels back up the loop and eventually quenches the source for energy injection times of order 10 sec. Most of the X-ray emission comes from the footpoints of the arch over most of the source lifetime and the spectrum is a power law with a typical spectral index of 3.0. Even though the efficiency gain in this model is only 2.8, it is much easier from the point of view of plasma physics to heat all the electrons in a plasma than to accelerate a substantial fraction of them.

Smith, D. F.↗

NASA NTRS1987

Electron heating by ion acoustic turbulence in simulated low Mach number shocks

Explicit and fully electromagnetic particle-in-cell simulations of perpendicular, collisionless, and nominally subcritical shocks are performed in one and two spatial dimensions using the code wave. Shock parameters are chosen to maximixe the growth rates of the current-driven ion acoustic instability in the shock. Electron heating by ion acoustic turbulence is observed at the shocks, at rates in agreement with second-order Vlasov theory predictions. However, the amount of resistive electron heating is small and ion reflection provides the major source of dissipation. Strictly resistive shocks do not exist for the parameters suitable for explicit particle codes running on today's supercomputers, because the plasma convects through these shocks so quickly that current-driven instabilities have little time to be amplified and to heat the electrons resistively. This effect is primarily a result of the relatively small values of omega(pe)/omega(ce) that can be analyzed.

Tokar, Robert L.↗

DOE OSTI2024

Experiments and gyrokinetic simulations of the nonlinear interaction between spinning magnetized plasma pressure filaments

A set of experiments using controlled, skin depth-sized plasma pressure filaments in close proximity have been carried out in a large linear magnetized plasma device. Two- and three-filament configurations have been used to determine the scale of cross field nonlinear interaction. When the filaments are separated by a distance of approximately five times the size of a single filament or less, a significant transfer of charge and energy occurs, leading to the generation of inter-filament electric fields. This has the effect of rotating the filaments and influencing the merging dynamics. Nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations using seeded filaments confirm the presence of unstable drift-Alfvén modes driven by the steep electron temperature gradient. When the filaments are within a few collisionless electron skin depths (separations twice the size of a single filament), the unstable perturbations drive the convective mixing of the density and temperature and rearrange the gradients such that they maximize in the region surrounding the filament bundle.

Sydora, R. D. (ORCID:0000000192543149)↗

DOE OSTI2023

Collaborative Research: Particle Simulation of Collisionless Magnetic Reconnection Under Finite Guide Field (Final Technical Report)

The project investigated 3-D linear instabilities of Harris current sheet under a realistic ion-to-electron mass ratio and a finite guide field. The excitation and 3-D properties of lower hybrid drift instability (LHDI), along with two new instabilities were demonstrated. The report presents the nonlinear properties of current sheet instabilities by employing Gyrokinetic electron and Fully kinetic ion (GeFi) particle simulation code. The GeFi simulation results are compared with fully kinetic PIC simulations.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

DOE OSTI2022

Velocity-space compression from Fermi acceleration with Lorentz scattering

The Fermi acceleration model describes how cosmic ray particles accelerate to great speeds by interacting with moving magnetic fields. In this work, we identify a variation of the model where light ions interact with a moving wall while undergoing pitch angle scattering through Coulomb collisions due to the presence of a heavier ionic species. The collisions introduce a stochastic component which adds complexity to the particle acceleration profile and sets it apart from collisionless Fermi acceleration models. The unusual effect captured by this simplified variation of Fermi acceleration is the nonconservation of phase space, with the possibility for a distribution of particles initially monotonically decreasing in energy to exhibit an energy peak upon compression. A peaked energy distribution might have interesting applications, such as to optimize fusion reactivity or to characterize astrophysical phenomena that exhibit nonthermal features.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

NASA NTRS1989

Collisionless reconnection in a quasi-neutral sheet near marginal stability

Particle simulations are used to investigate the process of collisionless reconnection in a magnetotail configuration which includes a pressure gradient along the tail axis and tail flaring. In the absence of electron stabilization effects, the tearing mode is stabilized when the ion gyrofrequency in the normal field exceeds the growth rate in the corresponding one-dimensional current sheet. The presence of a low-frequency electromagnetic perturbation in the lobes can serve to destabilize a marginally stable current sheet by producing an extended neutral-sheet region which can then undergo reconnection. These results help to explain how X-type neutral lines, such as those associated with the onset of magnetospheric substorms, can be formed in the near-earth plasma sheet.

Pritchett, P. L.↗

DOE OSTI2023

Weibel-like instability in magnetohydrodynamics

In magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), a density perturbation perpendicular to an electron temperature gradient generates a magnetic field around itself that acts to increase the perturbation, which can lead to instability. An MHD dispersion relation is obtained for perturbations perpendicular to a fixed electron temperature gradient with an initial in-plane magnetic field, including resistivity, viscosity, and the electrothermal coefficient. Instability occurs for sufficiently small electron temperature-gradient scale lengths determined by the ion collisionless skin depth. Both viscosity and resistivity are required to prevent growth at arbitrarily small spatial scales and to give a physical result for the fastest growing mode. The perpendicular electrothermal coefficient is only significant for a narrow range of low electron Hall parameters, causing a modest reduction in magnetic field growth and modifying the criteria for instability in the presence of viscosity. If the definition of the Weibel instabilityis extended to include all instabilities due to anisotropy in the electron velocity distribution, then this is a Weibel-like instability because an electron temperature gradient implies an anisotropic electron velocity distribution. Here, the implications for the formation of filaments in laser-produced plasmas and for the verification of MHD codes are considered.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

NASA NTRS1997

Photoelectron Effects on the Self-Consistent Potential in the Collisionless Polar Wind

The presence of unthermalized photoelectrons in the sunlit polar cap leads to an enhanced ambipolar potential drop and enhanced upward ion acceleration. Observations in the topside ionosphere have led to the conclusion that large-scale electrostatic potential drops exist above the spacecraft along polar magnetic field lines connected to regions of photoelectron production. A kinetic approach is used for the O(+), H(+), and photoelectron (p) distributions, while a fluid approach is used to describe the thermal electrons (e) and self-consistent electric field (E(sub II)) electrons are allowed to carry a flux that compensates for photoelectron escape, a critical assumption. Collisional processes are excluded, leading to easier escape of polar wind particles and therefore to the formation of the largest potential drop consistent with this general approach. We compute the steady state electric field enhancement and net potential drop expected in the polar wind due to the presence of photoelectrons as a function of the fractional photoelectron content and the thermal plasma characteristics. For a set of low-altitude boundary conditions typical of the polar wind ionosphere, including 0.1% photoelectron content, we found a potential drop from 500 km to 5 R(sub E) of 6.5 V and a maximum thermal electron temperature of 8800 K. The reasonable agreement of our results with the observed polar wind suggests that the assumptions of this approach are valid.

Khazanov, G. V.↗