Double plasma resonance instability as a source of solar zebra emission

TL;DR

This paper uses 3D PIC simulations to study the double plasma resonance instability, elucidating its role in generating solar radio zebras by analyzing wave growth, saturation energies, and electron distribution changes.

Contribution

It provides a detailed numerical analysis of the DPR instability, validating analytical growth rates and exploring wave saturation, enhancing understanding of solar zebra emission mechanisms.

Findings

Good agreement between numerical and analytical growth rates.

Saturation energies of upper-hybrid waves depend on hot electron density.

Maximum saturation energy reaches about 1% of hot electron kinetic energy.

Abstract

The double plasma resonance (DPR) instability plays a basic role in the generation of solar radio zebras. In the plasma, consisting of the loss-cone type distribution of hot electrons and much denser and colder background plasma, this instability generates the upper-hybrid waves, which are then transformed into the electromagnetic waves and observed as radio zebras. In the present paper we numerically study the double plasma resonance instability from the point of view of the zebra interpretation. We use a 3-dimensional electromagnetic particle-in-cell (3-D PIC) relativistic model. First using the multi-mode model, we study details of the double plasma resonance instability. We show how the distribution function of hot electrons changes during this instability. Then we show that there is a very good agreement between results obtained by the multi-mode and specific-mode models, which is caused by a dominance of the wave with the maximal growth rate. Therefore, for computations in a broad range of model parameters, we use the specific-mode model. We compute the maximal growth rates of the double plasma resonance instability. The results are compared with the analytical ones. We find a very good agreement between numerical and analytical growth rates. We also compute saturation energies of the upper-hybrid waves in a very broad range of parameters. We find that the saturation energies of the upper-hybrid waves show maxima and minima at almost the same values of $\omega_\mathrm{UH}/\omega_\mathrm{ce}$ as the growth rates. Furthermore, we find that the saturation energy of the upper-hybrid waves is proportional to the density of hot electrons. The maximum saturated energy can be up to one percent of the kinetic energy of hot electrons. All these findings can be used in the interpretation of solar radio zebras.