Relativistic fluid model of the resistive hose instability

Abstract

A systematic analysis of the hose instability using the relativistic fluid formulation is reported. In its basic nature, the hose instability is a macroscopic, low-frequency instability, hence a fluid model should, in principle, give an accurate account of the hose instability. It has been found that for zeroth-order beam displacements, giving rise to rigid beam displacements, the fluid wave equation and resulting dispersion relation are identical to the spread-mass model and the energy-group model results. When first-order fluid displacements are included as well, giving rise to compressible, nonfrozen displacements in the axial direction and beam cross-section distortion in the radial direction, then there is obtained a wave equation similar, but not identical to the multicomponent model. The dispersion relation is solved for numerically. The hose instability growth rate is found to be similar to the multicomponent model result, over part of the beam frame, real hose frequency range.