Reduced ion mass effects and parametric study of electron flat-top distribution formation

In particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation studies related to ion-ion two-stream instability, a reduced ion-to-electron mass ratio is often employed to save computation time. But it was not clearly verified how electrons dynamics are coupled with the slower evolution of ion-ion interactions under the external electric field. We have studied the ion beam driven instability using a 1D electrostatic PIC code by comparing different rescaling of parameter with real ion mass from the reference simulation with reduced ion mass. As the external electric field is stronger, the excited unstable mode range was more sensitively affected by the system size with the real mass ratio than the reduced ion mass. The results show that the reduced mass ratio should be used cautiously in PIC code as the electron dynamics can modify the ion instabilities. Additionally we found the formation of electron flat-top distribution in the final saturation stage. Simulation results show that in the early phase electrostatic solitary waves are quasi-periodically formed, but later they are fully dissipated resulting in heated, flat-top distributions. New electron beam components are occasionally formed. These are a consequence of the interaction with solitary wave structures. We parametrically investigate the development of electron phase space distributions for various drift speeds of ion beams and temperature ratios between ions and electrons