Instability of ion kinetic waves in a weakly ionized plasma

Abstract

The fundamental higher-order Landau plasma modes are known to be generally heavily damped. We show that these modes for the ion component in a weakly ionized plasma can be substantially modified by ion-neutral collisions and a dc electric field driving ion flow so that some of them can become unstable. This instability is expected to naturally occur in presheaths of gas discharges at sufficiently small pressures and thus affect sheaths and discharge structures.Comment: Published in Phys. Rev. E, see http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.85.02641