Berlin 2014 – scientific programme
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P: Fachverband Plasmaphysik
P 27: Theory of nonideal Plasmas
P 27.7: Talk
Friday, March 21, 2014, 12:30–12:45, SPA HS201
Kinetic simulations of plasma instabilities — •Benedikt Steinbusch1,2, Paul Gibbon1,3, and Richard Sydora4 — 1Institute for Advanced Simulation, JSC, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, 52425 Jülich — 2Institut für Laser- und Plasmaphysik, Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf, 40225 Düsseldorf — 3Centre for Mathematical Plasma Astrophysics, Department of Mathematics, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium — 4Department of Physics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G2E1, Canada
Magnetically confined plasmas can be subject to the Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) instability when an inhomogeneous electric field is crossed with the confining magnetic field, creating a sheared drift velocity. We investigate this instability in the kinetic, high-frequency regime where the ion cyclotron radius is comparable to or larger than the characteristic width of the shear flow.
First, we perform kinetic simulations of a conventional KH set-up with a homogeneous plasma density using our mesh-free treecode PEPC. We compare our results to both analytic fluid theory for the linear growth phase and previous computations performed with a Particle-in-Cell simulation.
Having established the validity of the mesh-free technique, we proceed to study the more complex case of a plasma-vacuum interface, where a sheared electric field arises naturally due to a difference in larmor radii of different species. Here, we also compare the treecode to PIC simulations, focussing on the long-term, non-linear evolution of the system.