A 263-nm Thomson-scattering beam was used to directly probe two-plasmon-decay (TPD) excited electron plasma waves (EPWs) driven by between two and five 351-nm beams on the OMEGA Laser System. The amplitude of these waves was nearly independent of the number of drive beams at constant overlapped intensity, showing that the observed EPWs are common to the multiple beams. In an experimental config...

Sharp magnetic perturbations found by the Cassini spacecraft at the edge of the Rhea flux tube are consistent with field-aligned flux tube currents. The current system results from the difference of ion and electron gyroradii and the requirement to balance currents on the sharp Rhea surface. Differential-type hybrid codes that solve for ion velocity and magnetic field have an intrinsic difficul...

Results from 1D Vlasov drift-kinetic plasma simulations reveal how and where auroral electrons are accelerated along Earth's geomagnetic field. In the warm plasma sheet, electrons become trapped in shear Alfvén waves, preventing immediate wave damping. As waves move to regions with larger v(Te)/v(A), their parallel electric field decreases, and the trapped electrons escape their influence. The ...

Spatially, temporally, and angularly resolved collinear collective Thomson scattering was used to diagnose the excitation and damping of a relativistic-phase-velocity self-modulated laser wakefield. The excitation of the electron plasma wave was observed to be driven by Raman-type instabilities. The damping is believed to originate from both electron beam loading and modulational instability. T...

High-frequency photons travelling in plasma exhibit a linear polarizability that can influence the dispersion of linear plasma waves. We present a detailed calculation of this effect for Langmuir waves as a characteristic example. Two alternative formulations are given. In the first formulation, we calculate the modified dispersion of Langmuir waves by solving the governing equations for the el...

A Hamiltonian description of oblique travelling waves in a two-fluid, charge-neutral, electron-proton plasma reveals that the transverse momentum equations for the electron and proton fluids are exactly integrable in cases where the total transverse momentum flux integrals, P (d) y and P (d) z , are both zero in the de Hoffman Teller (dHT) frame. In this frame, the transverse electric fields ar...

[1] Large-amplitude (up to 50 mV/m) solitary waves, identified as electron holes, have been observed during waveform captures on two of the four Cluster satellites during several plasma sheet encounters that have been identified as the passage of a magnetotail reconnection x line. The electron holes were seen near the outer edge of the plasma sheet, within and on the edge of a density cavity, a...

[1] Using statistical wave power spectral profiles obtained from CRRES and the latitudinal distributions of wave propagation modeled by the HOTRAY code, a quantitative analysis has been performed on the scattering of plasma sheet electrons into the diffuse auroral zone by multiband electrostatic electron cyclotron harmonic (ECH) emissions near L = 6 within the 0000–0600 MLT sector. The results ...

The multi-fluid plasma model only assumes local thermodynamic equilibrium within each fluid, e.g. ion and electron fluids for the two-fluid plasma model. Derivation of the MHD model involves several asymptotic and simplifying assumptions that can limit its applicability. Therefore, the two-fluid plasma model more accurately represents the appropriate physical processes. Physical parameters indi...

Particle simulations and analytic arguments are presented to demonstrate that the electron dissipation region, including the physics which breaks the frozen-in condition, does not affect the rate of reconnection in collisionless plasma. The result is a general consequence of the quadratic nature of the dispersion character of whistler waves, which control the plasma dynamics at small scales. Th...