THE EFFECT OF NONLINEAR LANDAU DAMPING ON ULTRARELATIVISTIC BEAM PLASMA INSTABILITIES
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Very high energy gamma-rays from extragalactic sources produce pairs from the extragalactic background light, yielding an electron–positron pair beam. This pair beam is unstable to various plasma instabilities, especially the "oblique" instability, which can be the dominant cooling mechanism for the beam. However, recently, it has been claimed that nonlinear Landau damping renders it physically irrelevant by reducing the effective damping rate to a low level. Here we show with numerical calculations that the effective damping rate is 8 × 10 −4 the growth rate of the linear instability, which is sufficient for the "oblique" instability to be the dominant cooling mechanism of these pair beams. In particular, we show that previous estimates of this rate ignored the exponential cutoff in the scattering amplitude at large wave numbers and assumed that the damping of scattered waves entirely depends on collisions, ignoring collisionless processes. We find that the total wave energy eventually grows to approximate equipartition with the beam by increasingly depositing energy into long-wavelength modes. As we have not included the effect of nonlinear wave–wave interactions on these long-wavelength modes, this scenario represents the "worst case" scenario for the oblique instability. As it continues to drain energy from the beam at a faster rate than other processes, we conclude that the "oblique" instability is sufficiently strong to make it the physically dominant cooling mechanism for high-energy pair beams in the intergalactic medium.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".