Spontaneous hole-clump pair creation in weakly unstable plasmas

A numerical simulation of a kinetic instability near threshold shows how a hole and clump spontaneously appear in the particle distribution function. The hole and clump support a pair of Bernstein, Greene, Kruskal (BGK) nonlinear waves that last much longer than the inverse linear damping rate while they are upshifting and downshifting in frequency. The frequency shifting allows a balance between the power nonlinearly extracted from the resonant particles and the power dissipated into the background plasma. These waves eventually decay due to phase space gradient smoothing caused by collisionality. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.