Evidence for the Oscillating Two Stream Instability and Spatial Collapse of Langmuir Waves in a Solar Type Iii Radio Burst

We present observational evidence for the oscillating two stream instability (OTSI) and spatial collapse of Langmuir waves in the source region of a solar type III radio burst. High time resolution observations from the STEREO A spacecraft show that Langmuir waves excited by the electron beam occur as isolated field structures with short durations ∼3.2 ms and with high intensities exceeding the strong turbulence thresholds. These short duration events are identified as the envelope solitons which have collapsed to spatial scales of a few hundred Debye lengths. The spectra of these wave packets contain an intense peak and two sidebands, corresponding to beam-resonant Langmuir waves, and down-shifted and up-shifted daughter Langmuir waves, respectively, and low-frequency enhancements below a few hundred Hz. The frequencies and wave numbers of these spectral components satisfy the resonance conditions of the OTSI. The observed high intensities, short scale lengths, sideband spectral structures, and low-frequency enhancements strongly suggest that the OTSI and spatial collapse of Langmuir waves probably control the nonlinear beam–plasma interactions in type III radio bursts.