Compressional effects in nonneutral plasmas, a shallow water analogy and m=1 instability

Diocotron instabilities form an important class of E×B shear flow instabilities which occur in nonneutral plasmas. The case of a single-species plasma confined in a cylindrical Penning trap, with an axisymmetric, hollow (nonmonotonic) density profile is studied. According to the standard linear theory, the m=1, k_z=0 diocotron mode is always stable. On the other hand, experiments by Driscoll [Phys. Rev. Lett. 64, 645 (1990)] show a robust exponential growth of m=1 diocotron perturbations in hollow density profiles. The apparent contradiction between these experimental results and linear theory has been an outstanding problem in the theory of nonneutral plasmas. A new instability mechanism due to the radial variation of the equilibrium plasma length is proposed in this paper. This mechanism involves the compression of the plasma parallel to the magnetic field and implies the conservation of the line integrated density. The predicted growth rate, frequency, and mode structure are in reasonable agreement with the experiment. The effect of a linear perturbation of the plasma length is also shown to give instability with a comparable growth rate. The conservation of the line integrated density in the plasma is analogous to the conservation of the potential vorticity in the shallow water equations used in geophysical fluid dynamics. In particular, there is an analog of Rossby waves in nonneutral plasmas.