Effects of electron trapping on nonlinear electron-acoustic waves excited by an electron beam via particle-in-cell simulations

Abstract

By performing one-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations, the nonlinear effects of electron-acoustic (EA) waves are investigated in a multispecies plasma, whose constituents are hot electrons, cold electrons, and beam electrons with immobile neutralized positive ions. Numerical analyses have identified that EA waves with a sufficiently large amplitude tend to trap cold electrons. Because EA waves are dispersive, where the wave modes with different wavenumbers have different phase velocities, the trapping may lead to the mixing of cold electrons. The cold electrons finally get thermalized or heated. The investigation also shows that the excited EA waves give rise to a broad range of wave frequencies, which may be helpful for understanding the broadband-electrostatic-noise spectrum in the Earth’s auroral region.