The nonlinear development of the relativistic two-stream instability

Abstract

The two-stream instability has been mooted as an explanation for a range of astrophysical applications from GRBs and pulsar glitches to cosmology. Using the first nonlinear numerical simulations of relativistic multi-species hydrodynamics we show that the onset and initial growth of the instability are very well described by linear perturbation theory. In the later stages the linear and nonlinear description match only qualitatively, and the instability does not saturate even in the nonlinear case by purely ideal hydrodynamic effects.