Drift instabilities in current sheets with guide field

Drift instabilities in current sheets with or without the guide field are investigated with a newly developed improved electrostatic dispersion relation. Traditional (local) theories of lower-hybrid drift instability typically assumes small electron drift speed, and expand the electron distribution function in Taylor series. This approximate treatment is removed in this paper. The resulting formalism is uniformly valid for an arbitrary magnitude of relative ion and electron drift speeds, and is valid for an arbitrary strength of the guide field.