Abstract Details
Abstracts
Author: Kun Huang
Requested Type: Consider for Invited
Submitted: 2025-02-12 10:32:07
Co-authors: B. Breizman
Contact Info:
The University of Texas at Austin
2515 Speedway, C1600
Austin, TX 78731
United States
Abstract Text:
When the driving electric field is strong enough, the number of runaway electrons (RE) tends to grow exponentially due to the avalanche effect caused by knock-on collisions. Above certain runaway currents, kinetic instabilities can arise, modifying the RE distribution and potentially halting the avalanche. Among self-excited waves in magnetized plasma, whistlers and magnetized plasma waves deserve the most attention. They upsurge on much shorter timescales than the runaway current lifetime, leading to a marginally stable state for the RE distribution. We have developed a code based on the discontinuous Galerkin method to solve the coupled wave-particle kinetic equations for runaway electrons and the excited waves . Our simulations involve collisional damping of waves, small-angle collisions, knock-on collisions, and synchrotron losses of the runaway electrons. We investigate the shape of a steady RE distribution in a given driving field and the corresponding RE current. We also determine the thresholds for the runaway avalanche and kinetic instability and plot the marginally stable runaway current versus the driving field.
Characterization: 1.0
Comments: