Collisional drift waves in the presences of coherent ion acoustic or Langmuir waves

Abstract

The dispersion properties of drift waves in a low β weakly collisional plasma, in the presence of ion acoustic or Langmuir waves parallel to magnetic lines, are investigated. It is shown that the non-linear interaction with an ion acoustic wave mainly leads to a shift of the drift wave spectrum towards lower frequencies (and only under very particular conditions affects the stability of the drift wave). The interaction with a Langmuir wave, on the contrary, yields a contribution to the imaginary part of the frequency. The conditions under which this stabilizes unstable drift modes are derived and discussed.