Collision effects on relativistic electron beam transport in warm plasma

Summary form only given. The propagation of a large flux of laser generated mildly relativistic electrons in warm resistive plasma is one of the most important problems for the fast ignition scenario of laser inertial confinement fusion. At the initial stage of propagation, the beam induces a return current in the plasma so that the beam-plasma system is unstable to three well known instabilities[1], i.e., the two-stream instability (TSI), the filamentation instability (FI), and the oblique instability (OI). The three instabilities are supposed to be the critical issues for the beam transport. We investigate these issues by both particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations and analytic kinetic theory[2].