Current-Driven Kink-Like Instability in Collisional Plasmas

The stability of left-hand circularly polarized waves propagating along an external magnetic field with wavelengths much larger than the ion Larmor radius is studied for fully-ionized collisional plasmas carrying a field-aligned current. It is found that, in the presence of electron-ion collisions, this "kink-like" instability has two branches of unstable wavenumbers: a main branch and a resistive branch. The resistive branch owes its existence to electron-ion collisions, but its growth rate is much smaller than that of the main branch, which is typically some fraction of the ion cyclotron frequency. The effect of collisions on the main branch is to reduce its maximum growth rate while extending the range of unstable wavenumbers to larger values. However, these changes are significant only when the electron-ion collision frequency is comparable to the electron cyclotron frequency. The dispersion relation is solved numerically for plasma and magnetic field parameters appropriate to the UCLA arcjet plasma. The results show that, within the framework of an infinite and homogeneous theory, the kink-like instability should occur in this plasma device.