Hot-cold plasma transition region: collisionless case

Abstract

We study processes at the transition region between hot (rare) and cold (dense) plasma in the collisionless regime. We use a 3-dimensional electromagnetic particle-in-cell (3-D PIC) relativistic code. Motivated by the transition region in the solar atmosphere the temperature and density ratio of the plasmas is chosen as 100 and 0.01, respectively. For better understanding of studied processes we make two types of computations: a) without any interactions among plasma particles (free expansion) and b) with the full electromagnetic interactions. In both the cases we found that the flux of cold plasma electrons and protons from colder plasma to hotter one dominates over the flux of hot plasma electrons and protons in the opposite direction. Thus, the plasma in the hotter part of the system becomes colder and denser during time evolution. In the case without any interactions among particles the cold plasma electrons and protons freely penetrate into the hot plasma. But, the cold plasma electrons are faster than cold plasma protons and therefore they penetrate deeper into the hotter part of the system than the protons. Thus, the cooling of the electron and proton components of the plasma in the hotter part of the system is different. On the other hand, in the case with the electromagnetic interactions, owing to the plasma property, which tries to keep the total electric current constant everywhere (close to zero in our case), the cold plasma electrons penetrate into the hotter part of the system together with the cold plasma protons. The plasma waves generated at the transition region during these processes reduce the number of electrons escaping from the hot plasma into the colder one. Therefore these waves support a temperature jump between hot and cold plasma.