Ion-temperature-gradient sensitivity of the hydrodynamic instability caused by shear in the magnetic-field-aligned plasma flow

TL;DR

This paper investigates how ion-temperature-gradient and shear in plasma flow influence hydrodynamic instabilities, revealing that increased ion-temperature gradient lowers the instability threshold and that kinetic effects significantly modify stability.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the combined effects of ion-temperature-gradient and flow shear on plasma stability, highlighting the transition from hydrodynamic to kinetic instabilities.

Findings

Ion-temperature gradient reduces the threshold for shear instability.

A kinetic instability arises from combined ion-temperature gradient and flow shear.

Maximum growth rate occurs near normalized wavenumber of order unity.

Abstract

The cross-magnetic-field (i.e., perpendicular) profile of ion temperature and the perpendicular profile of the magnetic-field-aligned (parallel) plasma flow are sometimes inhomogeneous for space and laboratory plasma. Instability caused by a gradient in either the ion-temperature profile or by shear in the parallel flow has been discussed extensively in the literature. In this paper, hydrodynamic plasma stability is investigated, real and imaginary frequency are quantified over a range of the shear parameter, the normalized wavenumber, and the ratio of density-gradient and ion-temperature-gradient scale lengths, and the role of inverse Landau damping is illustrated for the case of combined ion-temperature gradient and parallel-flow shear. We find that increasing the ion-temperature gradient reduces the instability threshold for the hydrodynamic parallel-flow shear instability, also known as the parallel Kelvin-Helmholtz instability or the D'Angelo instability. We also find that a kinetic instability arises from the coupled, reinforcing action of both free-energy sources. For the case of comparable electron and ion temperature, we illustrate analytically the transition of the D'Angelo instability to the kinetic instability as the shear parameter, the normalized wavenumber, and the ratio of density-gradient and ion-temperature-gradient scale lengths are varied and we attribute the changes in stability to changes in the amount of inverse ion Landau damping. We show that, near a normalized wavenumber $k_{\perp} \rho_{i}$ of order unity, the real and imaginary values of frequency become comparable and the growth rate maximizes.