Numerical study of Weibel instability driven by anisotropic electron temperature in collisionless plasmas

Abstract

We numerically investigate the process of generating magnetic fields from temperature anisotropy of electrons in collisionless initially uniform plasmas. We use a fully kinetic modeling and compare it against a hybrid modeling which treats ions kinetically and use ten-moment fluid model for electrons. The results of the one-to-one comparison show a good agreement in terms of the maximal magnitude of the self-generated magnetic field and similar trends during the non-linear stage of the instability. Additionally, we performed hybrid modelling of the instability without resolving electron spatial scales. In this case the results are only qualitatively the same however it shows that hydrodynamical approach can be used to some extent for the simulation of the Weibel instability in large-scale systems, including astrophysical environments and laser-produced plasmas.