instability - Southern California

Question

Astrophysical plasmas often experience a form of this phenomenon caused by the injection of a hot “stream” of particles. For 10 points each:

[10m] Name this phenomenon in which small perturbations cause a system to rapidly leave equilibrium, which shares its name with a property possessed by the inverted pendulum.

ANSWER: instability [or word forms like unstable; accept two-stream instability]

[10h] The two-stream instability is essentially the inverse of a damping process named for this Soviet physicist, who wrote a Course of Theoretical Physics with Evgeny Lifshitz and ranked the talent of physicists on a log-scale.

ANSWER: Lev Landau [or Lev Davidovich Landau]

[10e] Fluid instabilities occur when a wave’s frequency is one of these numbers, which equal a real number times the square root of negative one.

ANSWER: imaginary numbers [prompt on complex numbers]

<Editors, Physics>

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Summary


Northern California	Main	Y	4	12.50	100%	0%	25%
Southern California	Main	Y	7	15.71	86%	29%	43%
Eastern Canada (1)	Main	Y	5	12.00	80%	20%	20%
Eastern Canada (2)	Main	Y	9	13.33	89%	33%	11%
Florida	Main	Y	4	10.00	100%	0%	0%
Great Lakes	Main	Y	12	11.67	100%	8%	8%
Lower Mid-Atlantic	Main	Y	9	10.00	100%	0%	0%
Upper Mid-Atlantic	Main	Y	2	10.00	100%	0%	0%
Midwest	Main	Y	9	13.33	100%	22%	11%
North	Main	Y	4	12.50	100%	25%	0%
Northeast	Main	Y	10	11.00	90%	10%	10%
Pacific	Main	Y	8	16.25	100%	38%	25%
South Central	Main	Y	6	8.33	67%	0%	17%
Southeast	Main	Y	13	10.00	77%	8%	15%
UK (North)	UK	Y	5	12.00	100%	0%	20%
UK (South)	UK	Y	7	14.29	100%	14%	29%
Upstate NY	Main	Y	5	12.00	100%	20%	0%

Data


Claremont A	Claremont B	10	10	10	30
UCSD A	UC Santa Barbara	0	0	10	10
UCLA A	USC A	0	0	0	0
UCLA D	UCLA B	10	10	10	30
UCSD B	UCLA C	0	0	10	10
UCLA E	USC B	0	0	10	10
UC Irvine	UCLA F	0	10	10	20