Entrainment, stopping, and transmission of microwave solitons of self-induced transparency in counter-propagating magnetized electron beam

Abstract

Based on numerical simulations of a boundary problem, we study various scenarios of microwave soliton formation in the process of cyclotron resonance interaction of a short electromagnetic pulse with a counter-propagating initially rectilinear electron beam taking into account the relativistic dependence of the cyclotron frequency on the electrons’ energy. When a certain threshold in the pulse energy is exceeded, the incident pulse can propagate without damping in the absorbing beam, similar to the effect of self-induced transparency in optics. However, mutual motion of the wave and electrons can lead to some novel effects. For relatively small energy of the incident pulse, the microwave soliton is entrained by the electron beam opposite to the direction of the wave's group velocity. With an increase in the pulse energy, soliton stopping occurs. This regime is characterized by the close-to-zero pulse velocity and can be interpreted as a variety of the “light stopping.” High-energy microwave solitons propagate in the direction of the unperturbed group velocity. Their amplitude may exceed the amplitude of the incident pulse, i.e., nonlinear self-compression takes place. A further increase in the incident energy leads to the formation of additional high-order solitons whose behavior is similar to that of the first-order ones. The characteristics of each soliton (its amplitude and duration) correspond to analytical two-parametric soliton solutions that are to be found from consideration of the unbounded problem.