Influence of electron-neutral elastic collisions on the instability of an ion-contaminated cylindrical electron cloud: 2D3V PIC-with-MCC simulations

Abstract

This paper is a simulation based investigation of the effect of elastic collisions and effectively elastic-like excitation collisions between electrons and background neutrals on the dynamics of a cylindrically trapped electron cloud that also has an ion contaminant mixed in it. A cross section of the trapped non neutral cloud composed of electrons mixed uniformly with a fractional population of ions is loaded on a 2D PIC grid with the plasma in a state of unstable equilibrium due to differential rotation between the electron and the ion component. The electrons are also loaded with an axial velocity component, vz, that mimics their bouncing motion between the electrostatic end plugs of a Penning-Malmberg trap. This vz loading facilitates 3D elastic and excitation collisions of the electrons with background neutrals under a MCC scheme. In the present set of numerical experiments, the electrons do not ionize the neutrals. This helps in separating out only the effect of non-ionizing collisions of electrons on the dynamics of the cloud. Simulations reveal that these non-ionizing collisions indirectly influence the ensuing collisionless ion resonance instability of the contaminated electron cloud by a feedback process. The collisional relaxation reduces the average density of the electron cloud and thereby increases the fractional density of the ions mixed in it. The dynamically changing electron density and fractional density of ions feed back on the ongoing ion-resonance (two-stream) instability between the two components of the nonneutral cloud and produce deviations in the paths of progression of the instability that are uncorrelated at different background gas pressures. Effects of the collisions on the instability are evident from alteration in the growth rate and energetics of the instability caused by the presence of background neutrals as compared to a vacuum background. Further in order to understand if the non-ionizing collisions can independently be a cause of destabilization of an electron cloud, a second set of numerical experiments were performed with pure electron plasmas making non-ionizing collisions with different densities of background neutrals. These experiments reveal that the nature of potential energy extraction from the electron cloud by the non-ionizing collisions is not similar to the potential energy extraction of other destabilizing processes, e.g., a resistive wall instability. This difference in the energy extraction process renders these non-ionizing collisions incapable of independently triggering an instability of the cloud.