Quantitative study of the trapped particle bunching instability in Langmuir waves

The bunching instability of particles trapped in Langmuir waves is studied using Vlasov simulations. A measure of particle bunching is defined and used to extract the growth rate from numerical simulations, which are compared with theory [Dodin et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 215006 ( 2013)]. In addition, the general theory of trapped particle instability in 1D is revisited and a more accurate description of the dispersion relation is obtained. Excellent agreement between numerical and theoretical predictions of growth rates of the bunching instability is shown over a range of parameters. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.