Drift-cyclotron loss-cone instability in 3D simulations of a sloshing-ion simple mirror

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Auteurs principaux: Tran, Aaron, Frank, Samuel J., Le, Ari Y., Stanier, Adam J., Wetherton, Blake A., Egedal, Jan, Endrizzi, Douglass A., Harvey, Robert W., Petrov, Yuri V., Qian, Tony M., Sanwalka, Kunal, Viola, Jesse, Forest, Cary B., Zweibel, Ellen G.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Tran, Aaron
Frank, Samuel J.
Le, Ari Y.
Stanier, Adam J.
Wetherton, Blake A.
Egedal, Jan
Endrizzi, Douglass A.
Harvey, Robert W.
Petrov, Yuri V.
Qian, Tony M.
Sanwalka, Kunal
Viola, Jesse
Forest, Cary B.
Zweibel, Ellen G.
author_facet Tran, Aaron
Frank, Samuel J.
Le, Ari Y.
Stanier, Adam J.
Wetherton, Blake A.
Egedal, Jan
Endrizzi, Douglass A.
Harvey, Robert W.
Petrov, Yuri V.
Qian, Tony M.
Sanwalka, Kunal
Viola, Jesse
Forest, Cary B.
Zweibel, Ellen G.
contents The kinetic stability of collisionless, sloshing beam-ion (45° pitch angle) plasma is studied in a 3D simple magnetic mirror, mimicking the Wisconsin High-temperature superconductor Axisymmetric Mirror (WHAM) experiment. The collisional Fokker-Planck code CQL3D-m provides a slowing-down beam-ion distribution to initialize the kinetic-ion/fluid-electron code Hybrid-VPIC, which then simulates free plasma decay without external heating or fueling. Over 1-10 $μ$s, drift-cyclotron loss-cone (DCLC) modes grow and saturate in amplitude. DCLC scatters ions to a marginally-stable distribution with gas-dynamic rather than classical-mirror confinement. Sloshing ions can trap cool (low-energy) ions in an electrostatic potential well to stabilize DCLC, but DCLC itself does not scatter sloshing beam-ions into said well. Instead, cool ions must come from external sources such as charge-exchange collisions with a low-density neutral population. Manually adding cool ~1 keV ions improves beam-ion confinement several-fold in Hybrid-VPIC simulations, which qualitatively corroborates prior measurements from real mirror devices with sloshing ions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_04656
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Drift-cyclotron loss-cone instability in 3D simulations of a sloshing-ion simple mirror
Tran, Aaron
Frank, Samuel J.
Le, Ari Y.
Stanier, Adam J.
Wetherton, Blake A.
Egedal, Jan
Endrizzi, Douglass A.
Harvey, Robert W.
Petrov, Yuri V.
Qian, Tony M.
Sanwalka, Kunal
Viola, Jesse
Forest, Cary B.
Zweibel, Ellen G.
Plasma Physics
The kinetic stability of collisionless, sloshing beam-ion (45° pitch angle) plasma is studied in a 3D simple magnetic mirror, mimicking the Wisconsin High-temperature superconductor Axisymmetric Mirror (WHAM) experiment. The collisional Fokker-Planck code CQL3D-m provides a slowing-down beam-ion distribution to initialize the kinetic-ion/fluid-electron code Hybrid-VPIC, which then simulates free plasma decay without external heating or fueling. Over 1-10 $μ$s, drift-cyclotron loss-cone (DCLC) modes grow and saturate in amplitude. DCLC scatters ions to a marginally-stable distribution with gas-dynamic rather than classical-mirror confinement. Sloshing ions can trap cool (low-energy) ions in an electrostatic potential well to stabilize DCLC, but DCLC itself does not scatter sloshing beam-ions into said well. Instead, cool ions must come from external sources such as charge-exchange collisions with a low-density neutral population. Manually adding cool ~1 keV ions improves beam-ion confinement several-fold in Hybrid-VPIC simulations, which qualitatively corroborates prior measurements from real mirror devices with sloshing ions.
title Drift-cyclotron loss-cone instability in 3D simulations of a sloshing-ion simple mirror
topic Plasma Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.04656