A microscopic instability in neutral magnetized plasmas

TL;DR

This paper identifies microscopic oscillatory instabilities in neutral magnetized plasmas at high densities, linking them to the Brillouin limit and observed tokamak density constraints, with implications for plasma stability analysis.

Contribution

It demonstrates the existence of microscopic instabilities in neutral plasmas without averaging, connecting these to known macroscopic density limits and extending understanding of plasma behavior.

Findings

Microscopic oscillatory modes become unstable above a certain density threshold.

The density limit aligns with the Brillouin limit for nonneutral plasmas.

Dispersion relations match known electromagnetic and MHD behaviors at different wavelengths.

Abstract

We show that in a neutral magnetized plasma there exist microscopic oscillatory modes, with wavelengths of the order of magnitude of the mean interparticle distance, which become unstable when the electron density exceeds a limit proportional to the square of the magnetic field. The model we consider is just a linearization of the classical one for neutral plasmas, namely a system of electrons subjected to Coulomb interactions among themselves and with a uniform positive neutralizing background. This model is here dealt with as an actual many-body problem, without introducing any averaging over the individual particles. The expression of the density limit coincides, apart possibly from a numerical factor of order one, with the well-known Brillouin density limit for a nonneutral plasma, which has however a macroscopic origin. The density limit here found has the same order of magnitude as the operational density limit observed in several conventional tokamak devices. We finally show that, when the full electromagnetic interactions are taken into account, dispersion relations are obtained which for short wavelengths reduce to those obtained here in the purely Coulomb case, and for long wavelengths reproduce the familiar ones of MHD.