Physical mechanism of the Goldreich–Keeley radiative instability

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Abstract
We examine the physical processes underlying the Goldreich–Keeley instability. This is a radiative fully-electromagnetic instability for a single plasma, requiring no relative streaming of plasmas. We argue that the very general physical requirements for instability and the difficulty of quenching it by a spread in particle velocities implies that it is widespread in astrophysical environments, particularly pulsars. For reasonable pulsar parameters this radiative instability grows much faster than the beam-plasma modes usually invoked to explain charge bunching, and thus should dominate the characteristics of the observed radiation.

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