Abstract
The stability of a contact discontinuity in a collisionless plasma is examined. It is shown that the discontinuity can become unstable when the pressure component normal to the magnetic field is not continuous across the discontinuity. Even when the system is unstable, the growth rates are very small and unimportant in the context of wave propagation, except when the propagation is almost normal to the field. The instability could, however, lead to the slow dissipation of contact discontinuities in the solar wind and in the day side of the cusp region of the solar wind-magnetosphere boundary.
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