UCB 2026 -- Two-Stream Instability Live Tutorial

Last updated on 2026-04-08 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

Where can I find the material from the live WarpX tutorial (April 8, 2026)?

Objectives

Review the steps we followed during the live tutorial session. Access the input files, notebooks, and visualizations produced in class.

What we did

In this live session, we set up and ran a two-stream instability simulation from scratch using WarpX, following an exploratory approach:

  1. We browsed the WarpX examples on GitHub and picked the uniform plasma example as our starting point.

  2. We modified the input file:

    • Duplicated the electron species and added opposite drift velocities (uz_m) to create two counter-streaming beams.
    • Defined my_constants.nt so we could change the number of timesteps in one place.
    • Introduced a temperature constant T and used it to compute the thermal spread: ux_th = sqrt(T/m_e)/clight (and same for uy_th, uz_th). For an isotropic distribution, the temperature is the same in each direction: \(T = T_x = T_y = T_z\), and each component of the thermal spread is set independently.
    • Switched diagnostics to openPMD format so we could use openPMD-viewer to grab the data.

  3. We ran the simulation in 2D and made a quick Jupyter notebook to visualize the phase space \((z, u_z)\).

  4. The phase space wasn’t changing – so we increased the number of timesteps.

  5. We kept iterating: set the temperature to zero (cold beams), switched to 1D, increased the resolution and the number of particles per cell.

  6. Eventually, we saw the instability develop: the counter-streaming beams formed vortex structures in phase space.

  7. We made a video of the phase-space evolution.

Reference material

For a detailed walkthrough of the exploratory process we followed in class, see the Set Up a Simulation from Scratch episode.

For a polished version of the two-stream instability simulation, with exercises on parameter selection, reduced diagnostics, and analysis notebooks, see the Two-Stream Instability tutorial.

Files from the session

Video from class

Here is the phase-space video we produced at the end of the session:

As you can see, the dots are too large and it’s hard to see the fine structure. To improve the visualization, use a smaller marker size in the scatter plot, e.g. s=0.1. You may also notice that the instability takes a while to develop – the early frames are not very interesting.

Challenge

How can you make the instability grow faster?

Try to think of what controls the growth rate. What parameters could you change so that the instability develops sooner?

A couple of ideas:

  • Increase the density. The instability growth rate scales with the plasma frequency \(\omega_{pe} \propto \sqrt{n_0}\), so a higher density means faster growth.

  • Use random particle positions instead of uniform ones. With NUniformPerCell, the particles start on a regular grid, which is very quiet – the instability has to grow from roundoff-level noise. Switching to NRandomPerCell introduces more initial noise and can seed the instability earlier. Try changing injection_style from NUniformPerCell to NRandomPerCell and num_particles_per_cell_each_dim to num_particles_per_cell.

Key Points

Setting up a simulation is an iterative process: start from an existing example, modify, run, visualize, and refine.

The WarpX documentation and the examples gallery are the best starting points.

When things don’t look right, check the basics: enough timesteps, adequate resolution, and appropriate temperature.