Effect of Composition Gradient on Magnetothermal Instability Modified by Shear and Rotation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how composition gradients, shear, and rotation influence the magnetothermal instability in the intracluster medium, providing new stability criteria and analyzing their effects on plasma stability.

Contribution

It derives the mathematical stability criterion for composition gradient modified MTI considering magnetic tension, shear, and rotation effects in the plasma.

Findings

Derived exact stability criterion for composition gradient modified MTI.

Analyzed the coupling between Kelvin--Helmholtz instability and MTI.

Performed linear stability analysis for differentially rotating, stratified plasma.

Abstract

We model the intracluster medium as a weakly collisional plasma that is a binary mixture of the hydrogen and the helium ions, along with free electrons. When, owing to the helium sedimentation, the gradient of the mean molecular weight (or equivalently, composition or helium ions' concentration) of the plasma is not negligible, it can have appreciable influence on the stability criteria of the thermal convective instabilities, e.g., the heat-flux-buoyancy instability and the magnetothermal instability (MTI). These instabilities are consequences of the anisotropic heat conduction occurring preferentially along the magnetic field lines. In this paper, without ignoring the magnetic tension, we first present the mathematical criterion for the onset of composition gradient modified MTI. Subsequently, we relax the commonly adopted equilibrium state in which the plasma is at rest, and assume that the plasma is in a sheared state which may be due to differential rotation. We discuss how the concentration gradient affects the coupling between the Kelvin--Helmholtz instability and the MTI in rendering the plasma unstable or stable. We derive exact stability criterion by working with the sharp boundary case in which the physical variables---temperature, mean molecular weight, density, and magnetic field---change discontinuously from one constant value to another on crossing the boundary. Finally, we perform the linear stability analysis for the case of the differentially rotating plasma that is thermally and compositionally stratified as well. By assuming axisymmetric perturbations, we find the corresponding dispersion relation and the explicit mathematical expression determining the onset of the modified MTI.