Instabilities in Non-Thermal Plasmas

The project has looked at a variety of plasma instabilities driven by electron beams, providing theoretical support to experimental work carried out at the University of Strathclyde. Following on from earlier work on a cyclotron maser instability relevant to auroral kilometric radiation (AKR) we have investigated the effect of a background plasma on the original instability and possible competition with the two-stream instability. More detailed work on the instability has provided explanations for some of the details of AKR. We have also carried out some work on the anomalous Doppler instability, looking at the possibility of generating it using the Strathclyde apparatus.