Simulation study of coupled two-stream and current filamentation instability excited by accelerator electron beams in plasmas

Abstract

A gas-discharge plasma device is simulated with COMSOL software, and the obtained plasma density profile is input into a two-dimensional particle-in-cell code, in which the transport of relativistic electron beams in the plasma with an actual density profile is investigated. The results show that the device can produce a wide range of high-density plasmas with the maximum density approaching 5.25×1022 m−3. With the relativistic electron beams produced from a linear electron accelerator, the gas-discharge plasma is shown to be an ideal medium for the investigation of coupled two-stream and current filamentation instability.