Kavli Affiliate: Yi Zhou
| First 5 Authors: Yi Zhou, Paul M. Bellan
| Summary:
The two-stream instability (Buneman instability) is traditionally derived as
a collisionless instability with the presumption that collisions inhibit this
instability. We show here via a combination of a collisional two-fluid model
and associated experimental observations made in the Caltech plasma jet
experiment, that in fact, a low frequency mode of the two-stream instability is
indifferent to collisions. Despite the collision frequency greatly exceeding
the growth rate of the instability, the instability can still cause an
exponential growth of electron velocity and a rapid depletion of particle
density. High collisionality nevertheless has an important effect as it enables
the development of a double layer when the cross-section of the plasma jet is
constricted by a kink-instigated Rayleigh-Taylor instability.
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