Electron Weibel instability induced magnetic fields in optical-field ionized plasmas
Abstract
Generation and amplification of magnetic fields in plasmas is a long-standing topic that is of great interest to both plasma and space physics. The electron Weibel instability is a well-known mechanism responsible for self-generating magnetic fields in plasmas with temperature anisotropy and has been extensively investigated in both theory and simulations, yet experimental verification of this instability has been challenging. Recently, we demonstrated a new experimental platform that enables controlled initialization of highly nonthermal and/or anisotropic plasma electron velocity distributions via optical-field ionization. Using an external electron probe bunch from a linear accelerator, the onset, saturation, and decay of the self-generated magnetic fields due to electron Weibel instability were measured for the first time to our knowledge. In this paper, we will first present experimental results on time-resolved measurements of the Weibel magnetic fields in non-relativistic plasmas produced by Ti:Sapphire laser pulses (0.8 μm) and then discuss the feasibility of extending the study to a quasi-relativistic regime by using intense CO2 (e.g., 9.2 μm) lasers to produce much hotter plasmas.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 2022
- Source ID
- 10.1063/5.0089814
Entities
People
- Audrey Farrell
- Chandrashekhar J. Joshi
- Chaojie Zhang
- Chen-Kang Huang
- Igor Pogorelsky
- Irina Petrushina
- Jianfei Hua
- K. Kusche
- Kenneth A. Marsh
- Mikhail Fedurin
- Mikhail N Polyanskiy
- Mitchell Sinclair
- Navid Vafaei-Najaabadi
- Rotem Kupfer
- Warren B. Mori
- Wei Lu
- Yipeng Wu
Organizations
- Academia Sinica
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Brookhaven National Laboratory
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- National Science Foundation
- Office of Naval Research
- Stony Brook University
- Tsinghua University
- United States Department of Energy
- University of California, Los Angeles