Abstract
Electrostatic solitary structures are generated by injection of a suprathermal electron beam parallel to the magnetic field in a laboratory plasma. Electric microprobes with tips smaller than the Debye length () enabled the measurement of positive potential pulses with half-widths 4 to and velocities 1 to 3 times the background electron thermal speed. Nonlinear wave packets of similar velocities and scales are also observed, indicating that the two descend from the same mode which is consistent with the electrostatic whistler mode and result from an instability likely to be driven by field-aligned currents.
- Received 2 February 2010
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.115001
© 2010 The American Physical Society