Excitation of proton firehose instability in magnetospheric cold and hot proton plasma: a quasilinear approach

Abstract

Abstract Unstable states of different charged species in the solar wind and Earth’s magnetosphere are governed with the collective and collisional processes. For these dilute plasmas, the contribution of microinstabilities driven by the anisotropic particle distribution and heat flux becomes important in defining the stable/equilibrium states of electrons and ions/protons. The present paper highlights the key role of proton firehose instability to regulate an unchecked rise in the temperature anisotropy in these solar wind and magnetospheric environments. Right-handed circularly polarized proton firehose mode becomes unstable when the temperature condition of T ‖p > T ⊥p is satisfied, where the directional subscripts denote directions with respect to the ambient magnetic field. Based on the observations of magnetospheric multi-scale (MMS) space mission, we assume the bi-Maxwellian nature of the model distribution for the multi-component proton plasma. To study the time evolution of the unstable mode, we further allow the time variation in the cold and hot proton temperatures. For the choice of the initial conditions related with observations, we unveil the wave properties (growth and unstable wave number domain) corresponding to the cold/hot proton temperature anisotropy and the plasma betas of constituents proton components. In the back action of proton firehose instability, we highlight the time-scale modifications and saturation of initial bi-Maxwellian distributions and resulting wave-energy densities for various choices of initial cold-hot temperature anisotropy and plasma betas.