Instabilities of the relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell system on unbounded domains

Abstract

The relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell system describes the evolution of a collisionless plasma. The problem of linear instability of this system is considered in two physical settings: the so-called "one and one-half" dimensional case, and the three dimensional case with cylindrical symmetry. Sufficient conditions for instability are obtained in terms of the spectral properties of certain Schr\"odinger operators that act on the spatial variable alone (and not in full phase space). An important aspect of these conditions is that they do not require any boundedness assumptions on the domains, nor do they require monotonicity of the equilibrium.