Abstract
A particle in cell (PIC) simulation is used to investigate the excitation of electron acoustic waves (EAWs) and the stability of the EAWs against decay. An EAW is a nonlinear wave with a carefully tailored trapped particle population, and the excitation process must create the trapped particle population. For a collisionless plasma, successful excitation occurs when a relatively low amplitude driver that is spatially and temporally resonant with the EAW is applied for a sufficiently long time (many trapping periods). The excited EAW rings at a nearly constant amplitude long after the driver is turned off, provided the EAW has the largest wavelength that fits in the simulation domain. Otherwise, the excited EAW decays to a longer wavelength EAW. In phase space, this decay to longer wavelength appears as a tendency of the vortex-like trapped particle populations to merge. In a collisional plasma, successful excitation of an EAW requires the driver amplitude to exceed a threshold value. The period for a trapped particle oscillation must be short compared to the time for collisions to smooth out the trapped particle plateau.
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