• DOI:10.1063/1.4825236
• Corpus ID: 119238426

Robustness of the filamentation instability for asymmetric plasma shells collision in arbitrarily oriented magnetic field

@article{Bret2013RobustnessOT,
  title={Robustness of the filamentation instability for asymmetric plasma shells collision in arbitrarily oriented magnetic field},
  author={Antoine Bret},
  journal={Physics of Plasmas},
  year={2013},
  volume={20},
  pages={104503}
}

• A. Bret
• Published 2 October 2013
• Physics
• Physics of Plasmas

The filamentation instability triggered when two counter streaming plasma shells overlap appears to be the main mechanism by which collisionless shocks are generated. It has been known for long that a flow aligned magnetic field can completely suppress this instability. In a recent paper [Phys. Plasmas 18, 080706 (2011)], it was demonstrated in two dimensions that for the case of two cold, symmetric, relativistically colliding shells, such cancellation cannot occur if the field is not perfectly aligned. Here, this result is extended to the case of two asymmetric shells. The filamentation instability appears therefore as an increasingly robust mechanism to generate shocks.