A survey of fluid and kinetic instabilities relevant to space and laboratory plasmas

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a brief survey of a variety of plasma modeling techniques applied to several space- and fusion-relevant plasma instabilities that are presently of significant interest. These include simulations of the Weibel instability that occurs in astrophysical and laser plasmas, two-fluid plasma instabilities in fusion concepts such as Z-pinches that occur beyond the well-known magnetohydrodynamic instabilities, the magneto–Rayleigh–Taylor instability that occurs in a range of plasmas from the laboratory to space, the Richtmeyer–Meshkov instability which is an important instability in astrophysical and fusion plasmas, and the gradient-drift instability which is known to occur in ionospheric and magnetospheric plasmas. Recent advances in kinetic and fluid modeling provide the ability to study a wide variety of problems using the model that is best suited for the parameter regimes of interest. Some of the key findings are summarized here.

KEYWORDS:

• Plasma modeling
• kinetic
• fluid
• space science
• high-energy-density plasma
• astrophysical plasma

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge collaborations with Dr Ammar Hakim of PPPL, Dr Jacob King of Tech-X Corporation, and Dr Wayne Scales of Virginia Tech for this work. The authors acknowledge Advanced Research Computing at Virginia Tech and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Bhuvana Srinivasan  http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0712-1097

Notes

(1) https://gkeyll.readthedocs.io

(2) Simulation setup described in https://www.astro.princeton.edu/ jstone/Athena/tests/blast/blast.html

Additional information

Funding

The continuum kinetic work was funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under award number FA9550-15-1-0193. The MRT and RMI work was funded by the Department of Energy (Fusion Energy Sciences) under award number DE-SC0016515. Some of the GDI work was supported by the NSF CEDAR program (Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences) under award number AGS-1552188.