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| Paper: |
Structure and Stability of Phase Transition Layers in the Interstellar Medium |
| Volume: |
365, SINS — Small Ionized and Neutral Structures in the Diffuse Interstellar Medium |
| Page: |
127 |
| Authors: |
Inoue, T.; Inutsuka, S.; Koyama, H. |
| Abstract: |
We analyze the structure and stability of the transition layer (or front) that connects the cold neutral medium and warm neutral medium in the plane-parallel geometry. Such fronts appear in recent numerical simulations of thermally bistable interstellar medium. The front becomes the evaporation or condensation front depending on surrounding pressure. The stability analysis was done by long and short wavelength approximations. We find that the plane-parallel evaporation front is unstable under the corrugational deformation, whereas the condensation front seems to be stable. The growth rate of the instability is proportional to the evaporation flow speed and corrugation wavenumber for the long wavelength modes, and it is suppressed at the scale approximately equal to the thickness of the front. The timescale of the instability is comparable to or smaller than the cooling timescale of the warm neutral medium (~ 1 Myr). Thus, the instability should be one of the processes driving the interstellar turbulence. |
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