The Effect of Ion-to-Electron Mass Ratio on the Electron Beam-Plasma Interaction

Two-dimensional electromagnetic particle-in-cell simulations are carried out to investigate the effect of ion-to-electron mass ratio on the evolution of warm electron beam-plasma instability. Four cases are considered: A: mi/me = 0 (two-electron stream instability); B: mi/me = 1 (pair plasma); C: mi/me = 100; and D: mi/me = 1000. It is shown that the generation of Langmuir waves in the fundamental mode of electron plasma frequency and the subsequent dynamics of large-amplitude solitons are not affected by the ion species. However, it determines the decay process of solitons and the excitation of electromagnetic waves in the second harmonic. In the first two cases, mi/me = 0 and 1, there is no sign of emission in the second harmonic, while the strongest emission in the second harmonic is found for the case of largest mass ratio, mi/me = 1000. This confirms the two-step wave-wave coupling mechanism for the generation of second harmonic electromagnetic waves, which requires the excitation of ion-acoustic waves in the first step. Moreover, the dispersion diagrams of all excited waves are presented.

Onset of absolutely unstable behaviour in the Stokes layer: a Floquet approach to the Briggs method

For steady flows, the Briggs (Electron-Stream Interaction with Plasmas. MIT Press, 1964) method is a well-established approach for classifying disturbances as either convectively or absolutely unstable. Here, the framework of the Briggs method is adapted to temporally periodic flows, with Floquet theory utilised to account for the time periodicity of the Stokes layer. As a consequence of the antiperiodicity of the flow, symmetry constraints are established that are used to describe the pointwise evolution of the disturbance, with the behaviour governed by harmonic and subharmonics modes. On coupling the symmetry constraints with a cusp-map analysis, multiple harmonic and subharmonic cusps are found for each Reynolds number of the flow. Therefore, linear disturbances experience subharmonic growth about fixed spatial locations. Moreover, the growth rate associated with the pointwise development of the disturbance matches the growth rate of the disturbance maximum. Thus, the onset of the Floquet instability (Blennerhassett & Bassom, J. Fluid Mech., vol. 464, 2002, pp. 393–410) coincides with the onset of absolutely unstable behaviour. Stability characteristics are consistent with the spatio-temporal disturbance development of the family-tree structure that has hitherto only been observed numerically via simulations of the linearised Navier–Stokes equations (Thomas et al., J. Fluid Mech., vol. 752, 2014, pp. 543–571; Ramage et al., Phys. Rev. Fluids, vol. 5, 2020, 103901).

Improved and simplified design of the relativistic helitron resonator

One of the main trends in microwave electronics is the ultra-large power production. The electron stream energy is converted inside vacuum systems, where the key moment is increasing output power of microwave devices, which is possible only when using more and more powerful electron streams. Increasing electron stream power is possible due to either enhancing the carried currents or as a result of increasing the electron energy. Given the law that connects currents and voltages in electronic systems operating when the current is limited by a spatial charge, the production of ultra-high-power electron flows is associated with the usage of relativistic velocity electrons, i. e. approaching the light speed. Likewise, at present, relativistic electrovacuum devices (traveling-wave lamps and backward-wave lamps) use magnetic focusing for linear relativistic streams, which prevents the implementation of simple superconducting electrodynamic systems, because highfrequency metal superconductivity disappears in constant magnetic fields. Meanwhile, simplified ultra-highpower superconducting device structures can significantly increase the device energy due to the strong ohmic loss reduction, which just limits the device energy, destroying the working electrodynamic system surface by increasing power or pulse duration of the generator. The article outlines the modernized design of a new-type microwave generator – the relativistic helitron. The paper considers a simpler coaxial resonator design, obtained by using the supercritical narrowing of the inner conductor radius by the Hn1l mode of the electromagnetic field, rather than a coaxial resonator with notch filters.