TY  - JOUR
A1  - Stroman, Thomas
A1  - Pohl, Martin
A1  - Niemiec, Jacek
A1  - Bret, Antoine
T1  - Could cosmic rays affect instabilities in the Transition layer of  nonrealativistic collisionless shocks?
T2  - The astrophysical journal : an international review of spectroscopy and astronomical physics
N2  - There is an observational correlation between astrophysical shocks and nonthermal particle distributions extending to high energies. As a first step toward investigating the possible feedback of these particles on the shock at the microscopic level, we perform particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of a simplified environment consisting of uniform, interpenetrating plasmas, both with and without an additional population of cosmic rays. We vary the relative density of the counterstreaming plasmas, the strength of a homogeneous parallel magnetic field, and the energy density in cosmic rays. We compare the early development of the unstable spectrum for selected configurations without cosmic rays to the growth rates predicted from linear theory, for assurance that the system is well represented by the PIC technique. Within the parameter space explored, we do not detect an unambiguous signature of any cosmic-ray-induced effects on the microscopic instabilities that govern the formation of a shock. We demonstrate that an overly coarse distribution of energetic particles can artificially alter the statistical noise that produces the perturbative seeds of instabilities, and that such effects can be mitigated by increasing the density of computational particles.
KW  - cosmic rays
KW  - instabilities
KW  - plasmas
KW  - shock waves
Y1  - 2012
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/36134
SN  - 0004-637X
VL  - 746
IS  - 1
PB  - IOP Publ. Ltd.
CY  - Bristol
ER  -