Numerical simulation of phase-space flows in the Collisionless Terrella experiment

Non-Maxwellian plasmas confined in a magnetic dipole can become unstable to hot electron interchange (HEI) instability, which saturates nonlinearly exciting drift-resonant fluctuations with complex time-varying frequency spectrum. A fully self-consistent nonlinear model, which includes mu, J preserving guiding center drift Hamiltonian dynamics of hot electrons, reproduces the frequency sweeping observed experimentally, and suggests spontaneous formation and consequent inward propagation of "phase-space holes"-coherent structures in phase-space, that can cause particle radial transport. We present the results of the numerical simulation showing the time evolution of the phase-space.