Plasma Instabilities Generated by Streaming Particles

Abstract

It is well known that particles streaming along the ambient magnetic field in space plasmas may generate waves with frequencies of the order of the local ion gyrofrequency (ion waves), (Kindel and Kennel 1971). In this study we analyze the dispersion relation of these waves numerically and discuss mechanisms for damping and instability. All numerical results in this report are obtained with the computer code WHAMP (Rönnmark 1982a,b), which solves the dispersion relation of linear waves in a homogeneous plasma for a complex frequency as a function of a real wavevector. As a specific example we consider the S3-3 satellite observations of banded electrostatic ion waves, associated with streaming particles (Kintner et. al. 1979, Cattell 1981).