Plasma fireball sheath dynamics: A brief review and meta-analysis

TL;DR

This paper reviews plasma fireball sheath formation, instabilities, and damping mechanisms, providing schematic illustrations, experimental insights, and distinctions between different fireball types in laboratory and space environments.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive synthesis of plasma fireball sheath dynamics, including recent experimental data, instability analysis, and future research directions, with detailed comparisons between fireball classes.

Findings

Identification of instability triggering dynamics

Differentiation between regular and inverted fireballs

Insights into damping mechanisms of instabilities

Abstract

We present a comprehensive overview of the formation mechanism of plasma fireball sheath (PFS) structures, sheath-induced collective phenomena, associated relevant instabilities, and corresponding onset conditions. It includes an optimum set of self-illustrative schematic figures, relevantly manifesting the instability triggering dynamics, various involved metastable stages, and parametric threshold conditions. The possible damping mechanisms of excited instabilities in the usual PFS systems are also highlighted. An up-to-date experimental glimpse of both the regular fireball (RFB) and inverted fireball (IFB) classes is specifically presented. We explicitly offer illustrative appendices showing the main distinctions between (a) RFB and IFB, (b) laboratory and astrocosmic fireballs, and (c) RFB sheath and IFB sheath formations. It provides a panoptic glimpse of the current RFB and IFB studies with a special mention to both laboratory and astrospace plasmas. A holistic outline on the chronological development of the PFS research investigations, since the inception of plasma-electrode coupling studies, is outlined. A clear indication of the future fireball scope in both theoretic and applied perspectives is finally emphasized.