The existence of stable BGK waves (Q529633)

As is well known, the 1D Vlasov-Poisson (VP) system is the simplest kinetic model of an electrostatic collisionless plasma. The Bernstein-Greene-Kruskal (BGK) waves are accepted as the exact, spatially periodic, steady state solution of this system. They appear also as attractor or final state, towards which waves, starting in the neighbourhood of the good frequency, tend. Therefore it is important to construct stable BGK waves. The problem is that this cannot be done by the traditional energy-Casimir method, because the starting distribution function should be monotone decreasing towards the kinetic energy of the particles -- but this is not the case. For homogeneous equilibria, owning the separation of Fourier modes, a simple dispersion relation can be obtained, which -- in principle -- could be analyzed and the Penrose stability criterion could be used. But this is very intricate, since, even for small BGK waves, the dispersion relation is difficult to study for linear stability, due to the coupling of infinitely many modes. Therefore the authors show that small BGK waves with non-even distribution are generally stable, the spectra of the linearized operator lies on the imaginary axis. A sharp stability condition is given for small BGK waves with even profiles. The stability of the spectra is studied in detail.