Fluid simulation of Jeans instability in nonthermal dusty plasmas
Phys. Rev. E 113, 055212 – Published 15 May, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/jfw8-rv8g
Abstract
The Jeans instability is a fundamental mechanism driving the gravitational collapse and subsequent structure formation in diverse self-gravitating astrophysical environments. We present comprehensive numerical fluid simulations of the Jeans instability in a three component dusty plasma system. The high-energetic nonthermal electrons and ions are considered to follow κ distribution in velocity space with inertial dust as cold fluid. A Gaussian-type of initial density perturbation is introduced in the equilibrium density to initiate the simulations. The effects of the self-gravity parameter and nonthermal spectral index on the Jeans instability have been investigated by tracking the evolution of plasma parameters in the simulations. In the absence of gravity , the system exhibits stable dust acoustic wave propagation with no Jeans instability growth, confirming pressure-dominated dynamics. Whereas, for , the density increases exponentially at center of plasma system manifesting localized collapse. The nonlinear growth rates estimated from our simulations increase with and show good agreement with the linear theory, particularly for lower values. Simulations further demonstrate that the nonlinear growth rate is weakly dependent on ; however, lower values significantly decrease the characteristic collapse time . These findings establish that nonthermal (non-Maxwellian) environments in protoplanetary disks and molecular clouds are more efficient at catalyzing rapid structure formation than previously predicted by traditional thermal (Maxwellian) models.