Control of Ion-Acoustic Wave Instabilities in a Gaseous Discharge

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Abstract
The marginal-stability boundary for spontaneous generation of ion-acoustic waves in a nonequilibrium plasma is investigated experimentally. The transition from inverse Landau damping to normal Landau damping of the acoustic wave modes is demonstrated by observing the change in forward-scattering cross section of microwave electromagnetic energy. The measured scattering cross section is compared with that predicted by Ichimaru, using a simple relaxation-time collision term in the Boltzmann equation. In addition, the collision term of Bhatnagar et al. is used to construct a new marginal-stability boundary. The latter expression seems to give a better comparison with the observed microwave scattering and demonstrates the superiority of the more realistic collision-term model.