Enrique Bello, member of our team has contributed to the paper “Effect of injection conditions on the non-linear behavior of the ECDI and related turbulent transport”, just published in the journal Physics of Plasmas.

The work revisits the classical electron-cyclotron drift instability (ECDI) and analyse its non-linear evolution using an in-house 2D PIC model, comparing periodic and injection/absorbing axial conditions.

The authors report that fully-periodic simulations show an early behavior that agrees well with what can be expected from the theory and other works, but present no oscillations or axial electron transport in the long-term. When the plasma is injected axially, different regimes are found by changing the residence time of the injected ions; observing a significant level of long-term transport for conditions that match those in a conventional Hall discharge.

You can read the open access publication here.