Ladder Climbing and Autoresonant Acceleration of Plasma Waves

I. Barth, I. Y. Dodin, and N. J. Fisch

Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 075001 – Published 11 August 2015

Abstract

When the background density in a bounded plasma is modulated in time, discrete modes become coupled. Interestingly, for appropriately chosen modulations, the average plasmon energy might be made to grow in a ladderlike manner, achieving upconversion or downconversion of the plasmon energy. This reversible process is identified as a classical analog of the effect known as quantum ladder climbing, so that the efficiency and the rate of this process can be written immediately by analogy to a quantum particle in a box. In the limit of a densely spaced spectrum, ladder climbing transforms into continuous autoresonance; plasmons may then be manipulated by chirped background modulations much like electrons are autoresonantly manipulated by chirped fields. By formulating the wave dynamics within a universal Lagrangian framework, similar ladder climbing and autoresonance effects are predicted to be achievable with general linear waves in both plasma and other media.

Received 1 April 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.075001

Authors & Affiliations

I. Barth¹, I. Y. Dodin^1,2, and N. J. Fisch^1,2

¹Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08543, USA
²Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA