The effect of nonlinear Landau damping on ultrarelativistic beam plasma instabilities

Abstract

Very high energy gamma-rays from extragalactic sources produce pairs from the extragalactic background light, yielding an electron-positron pair beam. This pair beam is unstable to various plasma instabilities, especially the "oblique" instability, which can be the dominant cooling mechanism for the beam. However, recently, it has been claimed that nonlinear Landau damping renders it physically irrelevant by reducing the effective damping rate to a low level. Here we show with numerical calculations that the effective damping rate is 8 × 10-4 the growth rate of the linear instability, which is sufficient for the "oblique" instability to be the dominant cooling mechanism of these pair beams. In particular, we show that previous estimates of this rate ignored the exponential cutoff in the scattering amplitude at large wave numbers and assumed that the damping of scattered waves entirely depends on collisions, ignoring collisionless processes. We find that the total wave energy eventually grows to approximate equipartition with the beam by increasingly depositing energy into long-wavelength modes. As we have not included the effect of nonlinear wave-wave interactions on these long-wavelength modes, this scenario represents the "worst case" scenario for the oblique instability. As it continues to drain energy from the beam at a faster rate than other processes, we conclude that the "oblique" instability is sufficiently strong to make it the physically dominant cooling mechanism for high-energy pair beams in the intergalactic medium.