Explosive instability of a lower hybrid wiggler free-electron laser

Lower hybrid wave wigglers appear to have some advantages over Langmuir wave wigglers in generating shorter wavelengths in a free-electron laser. However, the oscillating two-stream instability of the wiggler is a potential threat to the device, limiting the operation regime to high plasma temperatures and high beam currents. At large beam currents the free-electron laser instability is explosive and may be used for the generation of intense short pulses.