Spontaneous and explicit parity-time-symmetry breaking in drift wave instabilities

TL;DR

This paper introduces a PT-symmetry analysis method to study drift wave instabilities, revealing how spontaneous and explicit PT-symmetry breaking lead to different types of plasma instabilities and identifying a new collisional instability.

Contribution

The paper applies PT-symmetry analysis to drift wave instabilities, uncovering mechanisms of symmetry breaking and discovering a new collisional instability in plasma physics.

Findings

Spontaneous PT-symmetry breaking causes ITG instability.

Explicit PT-symmetry breaking results in collisional instability.

A new unstable drift wave induced by finite collisionality is identified.

Abstract

A method of Parity-Time (PT)-symmetry analysis is introduced to study the high dimensional, complicated parameter space of drift wave instabilities. We show that spontaneous PT-symmetry breaking leads to the Ion Temperature Gradient (ITG) instability of drift waves, and the collisional instability is the result of explicit PT-symmetry breaking. A new unstable drift wave induced by finite collisionality is identified. It is also found that gradients of ion temperature and density can destabilize the ion cyclotron waves when PT symmetry is explicitly broken by a finite collisionality.