Kinetic simulations of the filamentation instability in pair plasmas

Abstract The nonlinear interaction between electromagnetic waves and plasmas attracts significant attention in astrophysics because it can affect the propagation of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs)—luminous millisecond-duration pulses detected at radio frequency. filamentation instability (FI)— a type wave-plasma interaction—is considered to be dominant near FRB sources, its development may also inferred dispersion measure FRBs. In this paper, we carry out fully kinetic particle-in-cell simulations FI unmagnetized pair plasmas. Our show that generates transverse density filaments, wave propagates vacuum them, as waveguide. filaments keep merging until force balance ponderomotive plasma pressure gradient is established. We estimate timescale discuss implications filament for observations.