The effect of boundaries on the ion acoustic beam-plasma instability in experiment and simulation
The ion acoustic beam-plasma instability is known to excite strong solitary waves near the Earth's bow shock. Using a double plasma experiment, tightly coupled with a 1-dimensional particle-in-cell simulation, the results presented here show that this instability is critically sensitive to the experimental conditions. Boundary effects, which do not have any counterpart in space or in most simulations, unavoidably excite parasitic instabilities. Potential fluctuations from these instabilities lead to an increase of the beam temperature which reduces the growth rate such that non-linear effects leading to solitary waves are less likely to be observed. Furthermore, the increased temperature modifies the range of beam velocities for which an ion acoustic beam plasma instability is observed.