Speaker
Description
The cosmic-ray-driven non-resonant instability of Bell (2004) assumes that both the cosmic rays and the background plasma are collisionless. It is a special case of non-resonant instabilities that are active across a range of collisionalities. In laser-plasmas they manifest themselves as heat flow instabilities and instabilities driven by currents of energetic electrons (Bell, Kingham, Watkins & Matthews, 2020). If the concept of collisions is broadened to include scattering by small-scale magnetic fluctuations we find that the cosmic-ray-driven-instability is active on scalelengths greater than the cosmic ray Larmor radius. I will also describe a new Vlasov-Fokker-Planck code (fastVFP) and show that the collisional Weibel instability can be important when a plasma is non-uniformly heated by a laser (collaborative work with Mark Sherlock, LLNL).
