Electron beam instabilities in unmagnetized plasmas via the Stieltjes transform (linear theory and nonlinear mode coupling)

The Stieltjes transform has been used in place of a more common Laplace transform to determine the time evolution of the self-consistent field (SCF) of an unmagnetized semi-infinite plasma, where the plasma electrons together with a primary and a low-density secondary electron beam move perpendicular to the boundary surface. The secondary beam is produced when the primary beam strikes the grid. Such a plasma system has been investigated by Griskey and Stanzel [M. C. Grisky and R. L. Stenzel, Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 556 (1999)]. The physical phenomenon, observed in their experiment, has been named by them as “secondary beam instability.” The character of the instability observed in the experiment is not the same as predicted by the conventional treatments—the field amplitude does not grow with time. In the frequency spectrum, the theory predicts peak values in the amplitude of SCF at the plasma frequency of plasma and secondary beam electrons, decreasing above and below it. The Stieltjes transform for functions, growing exponentially in the long time limit, does not exist, while the Laplace transform technique gives only exponentially growing solutions. Therefore, it should be interesting to know the kind of solutions that an otherwise physically unstable plasma will yield. In the high-frequency limit, the plasma has been found to respond to any arbitrary frequency of the initial field differentiated only by the strength of the resulting SCF. The condition required for exponential growth in the conventional treatments, and the condition for maximum amplitude (with respect to frequency) in the present treatment, have been found to be the same. Nonlinear mode coupling between the modes excited by the plasma electrons and the low-density secondary beam gives rise to two frequency-dependent peaks in the field amplitude, symmetrically located about the much stronger peak due to the plasma electrons, as predicted by the experiment