The effect of ion to electron mass ratio on Ion beam driven instability and ion holes by PIC simulation

Previous simulations posed a problem that they used reduced ion to electron mass ratios to save computation time. It was assumed that ion and electron dynamics are sufficiently separated, but it was not clearly verified. In this study, we examine the effect of ion to electron mass ratios on the generation of ion holes by ion beam driven instability. Ion holes are generated via electron holes in an applied electric field with the given initial condition. First, the ion acoustic instability is excited and nonlinearly develops. After the ion acoustic instability nonlinearly develops, the ion two-stream instability is excited and develops into ion holes. This implies that the previously suggested ion beam driven instability is strongly affected by the coupling between ions and electrons and the ion to electron mass ratio is important on the development of the instability. The energy transition and detail variation is different as reduced mass ratio under the same observation value based on FAST satellite. Although, the parameters are rescaled by conserving the kinetic energy to obtain the proper results, the nonlinear evolution is not perfectly identical.