Intergrain forces in low-Mach-number plasma wakes
Name
Hutchinson-2012-Intergrain forces in low-Mach-number plasma wakes.pdf
Size
2.17 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Hutchinson, Ian Horner
Date Issued
June 2012
Journal
Physical Review E
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Hutchinson, I. “Intergrain Forces in low-Mach-number Plasma Wakes.” Physical Review E 85.6 (2012). ©2012 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Large-scale particle-in-cell calculations of the plasma wake interactions of two negatively charged grains smaller than the Debye length are carried out using the coptic code over a wide range of subsonic plasma flow velocities. In plasmas with the temperature ratio T[subscript e]/T[subscript i]=100, it is found that a single grain's oscillatory wake disappears for flow Mach numbers M less than approximately 0.3, which is the parameter regime where Landau damping is expected to be strong. Neutral collisions suppress potential oscillations above M=0.3, but not the trailing attractive potential peak caused by ion focusing. The transverse (grain-aligning) force on a downstream particle in the wake of another is obtained rigorously from the code in three-dimensional simulations. It shows general agreement with the force that would be deduced from the single-grain wake potential gradient. Except for relatively large grains in the nonlinear collisional regime, the grain-aligning force is very small for slow flow.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.85.066409
