Excitation of whistler and slow-X waves by runaway electrons in a collisional plasma

TL;DR

This study investigates how runaway electrons in collisional plasmas excite whistler and slow-X waves, revealing that slow-X modes are excited earlier and grow faster, suggesting they are important in plasma wave dynamics.

Contribution

The paper provides a detailed analysis of runaway electron-driven excitation of slow-X and whistler waves, highlighting the significance of slow-X modes in collisional plasma conditions.

Findings

Slow-X modes are excited before whistlers during runaway current ramp-up.

Most unstable slow-X modes have higher growth rates than whistler modes.

Slow-X modes should be considered alongside whistlers in plasma wave studies.

Abstract

Runaway electrons are known to provide robust ideal or collisionless kinetic drive for plasma wave instabilities in both the whistler and slow-X branches, via the anomalous Doppler-shifted cyclotron resonances. In a cold and dense post-thermal-quench plasma, collisional damping of the plasma waves can be competitive with the collisionless drive. Previous studies have found that for its higher wavelength and frequency, slow-X waves suffer stronger collisional damping than the whistlers, while the ideal growth rate of slow-X modes is higher. Here we study runaway avalanche distributions that maintain the same eigen distribution and increase only in magnitude over time. The distributions are computed from the relativistic Fokker-Planck-Boltzmann solver, upon which a linear dispersion analysis is performed to search for the most unstable or least damped slow-X and whistler modes. Taking into account the effect of plasma density, plasma temperature, and effective charge number, we find that the slow-X modes tend to be excited before the whistlers in a runaway current ramp-up. Furthermore, even when the runaway current density is sufficiently high that both branches are excited, the most unstable slow-X mode has much higher growth rate than the most unstable whistler mode. The qualitative and quantitative trends uncovered in current study indicate that even though past experiments and modeling efforts have concentrated on whistler modes, there's a compelling case that slow-X modes should also be a key area of focus.