  Particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations are widely used as a tool to investigate
instabilities that develop between a collisionless plasma and beams of charged
particles. However, even on contemporary supercomputers, it is not always
possible to resolve the ion dynamics in more than one spatial dimension with
such simulations. The ion mass is thus reduced below 1836 electron masses,
which can affect the plasma dynamics during the initial exponential growth
phase of the instability and during the subsequent nonlinear saturation. The
goal of this article is to assess how far the electron to ion mass ratio can be
increased, without changing qualitatively the physics. It is first demonstrated
that there can be no exact similarity law, which balances a change of the mass
ratio with that of another plasma parameter, leaving the physics unchanged.
Restricting then the analysis to the linear phase, a criterion allowing to
define a maximum ratio is explicated in terms of the hierarchy of the linear
unstable modes. The criterion is applied to the case of a relativistic electron
beam crossing an unmagnetized electron-ion plasma.
