Secondary Whistler and Ion-cyclotron Instabilities Driven by Mirror Modes in Galaxy Clusters

Abstract

Electron cyclotron waves (whistlers) are commonly observed in plasmas near Earth and the solar wind. In the presence of nonlinear mirror modes, bursts of whistlers, usually called lion roars, have been observed within low magnetic field regions associated with these modes. In the intracluster medium (ICM) of galaxy clusters, the excitation of the mirror instability is expected, but it is not yet clear whether electron and ion cyclotron (IC) waves can also be present under conditions where gas pressure dominates over magnetic pressure (high β). In this work, we perform fully kinetic particle-in-cell simulations of a plasma subject to a continuous amplification of the mean magnetic field B (t) to study the nonlinear stages of the mirror instability and the ensuing excitation of whistler and IC waves under ICM conditions. Once mirror modes reach nonlinear amplitudes, both whistler and IC waves start to emerge simultaneously, with subdominant amplitudes, propagating in low- B regions, quasi-parallel to B (t). We show that the underlying source of excitation is the pressure anisotropy of electrons and ions trapped in mirror modes with loss-cone-type distributions. We also observe that IC waves play an essential role in regulating the ion pressure anisotropy at nonlinear stages. We argue that whistler and IC waves are a concomitant feature at late stages of the mirror instability even at high β, and therefore, expected to be present in astrophysical environments like the ICM. We discuss the implications of our results for collisionless heating and dissipation of turbulence in the ICM.