Ih. Cairns et Pa. Robinson, INCONSISTENCY OF ULYSSES MILLISECOND LANGMUIR SPIKES WITH WAVE COLLAPSE IN TYPE-III RADIO-SOURCES, Geophysical research letters, 22(24), 1995, pp. 3437-3440
Recent Ulysses observations of millisecond spikes superposed on broade
r Langmuir wave packets in type III radio sources are compared quantit
atively with constraints from the theory of wave collapse. It is found
that both the millisecond spikes and the wave packets have fields at
least 10 times too small to be consistent with collapse, contrary to p
revious interpretations in terms of this process. Several alternative
explanations are considered and it is argued that the spikes should be
interpreted as either non-collapse phenomena or observational artifac
ts. To the extent the observations are representative, this rules out
theories for type III bursts at similar to 1 - 4 AU that rely on colla
pse.