Negative-Mass Instability in Nonlinear Plasma Waves

Negative-mass instability in nonlinear plasma waves.

The negative-mass instability, previously found in ion traps, appears as a distinct regime of the sideband instability in nonlinear plasma waves with trapped particles. As the bounce frequency of these particles decreases with the bounce action, bunching can occur if the action distribution is inverted in trapping islands. In contrast to existing theories that also infer instabilities from the ...

Large scale instability of nonlinear standing waves

Instability of nonlinear dispersive solitary waves

We consider linear instability of solitary waves of several classes of dispersive long wave models. They include generalizations of KDV, BBM, regularized Boussinesq equations, with general dispersive operators and nonlinear terms. We obtain criteria for the existence of exponentially growing solutions to the linearized problem. The novelty is that we dealt with models with nonlocal dispersive t...

Instability of higher harmonic electrostatic ion cyclotron waves in a negative ion plasma

We present a kinetic theory analysis of the electrostatic ion cyclotron (EIC) instability in a plasma containing positive ions, electrons, and negative ions that are much more massive than the positive ions. Conditions are investigated for exciting the fundamental and the higher harmonic EIC waves associated with each ion species. We find that as the concentration of heavy negative ions increas...

Evolution of nonlinear waves in compressing plasma