Magnetohydrodynamic Fluid Stability in the Presence of Streaming Cosmic Rays

TL;DR

This study investigates the stability of magnetohydrodynamic fluids with streaming cosmic rays near shocks, finding that including cosmic ray inertia stabilizes the system and prevents magnetic field amplification.

Contribution

It explicitly incorporates cosmic ray inertia into MHD stability analysis, revealing that this inclusion prevents instabilities previously predicted by simpler models.

Findings

No magnetic field amplification beyond shock compression occurs.

Cosmic ray inertia stabilizes the fluid system.

Additional Hall-like magnetic effects are identified.

Abstract

We examine the effects of streaming cosmic rays upstream of a strong, parallel collisionless shock. We include explicitly the inertia of the cosmic rays in our analysis, which was neglected in previous work. For parameters relevant to the acceleration of cosmic rays at a supernova blast wave, we find no MHD fluid instability that would lead to the amplification of the magnetic field above that given by the compression at the shock. We show how to recover, from our own analysis, the cosmic-ray-driven MHD fluid instability found by previous authors. We conclude that including the inertia and dynamics of the cosmic rays keeps the system stable. More over, the cosmic ray current leads to an additional Hall-like term in the magnetic evolution equation. The implications of this paper for acceleration of galactic cosmic rays at supernova remnants are briefly discussed.