Electromagnetic instability in collisionless anisotropic plasma contrastreams

The electromagnetic instability in collisionless, anisotropic magnetized plasma contrastreams for perturbations propagating normally to the ambient magnetic field is investigated. It is found that the parallel temperature stabilizes the configuration forT _‖≤T _⊥ while it shows destabilizing effect forT _‖>T _⊥. A comparative study of the growth rates associated with various coexisting modes reveals that the electromagnetic instability may, under certain conditions, be associated with larger growth rates than the electrostatic instability.