Magnetic holes in plasmas close to the mirror instability

Abstract. Non-propagating magnetic hole solutions in anisotropic plasmas near the mirror instability threshold are investigated in numerical simulations of a fluid model that incorporates linear Landau damping and finite Larmor radius corrections calculated in the gyrokinetic approximation. This FLR-Landau fluid model reproduces the subcritical mirror bifurcation recently identified on the Vlasov-Maxwell system, both by theory and numerics. Stable magnetic hole solutions that display a polarization different from that of Hall-MHD solitons are indeed obtained slighlty below threshold, while magnetic patterns and spatio-temporal chaos emerge when the system is maintained in a mirror unstable regime.