Weak turbulence theory for collisional plasmas

Yoon, P.H., Ziebell, L.F., Kontar, E.P. and Schlickeiser, R. (2016) Weak turbulence theory for collisional plasmas. Physical Review E, 93(3), 033203. (doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.93.033203) (PMID:27078471)

Abstract

Plasma is an ionized gas in which the collective behavior dominates over the individual particle interactions. For this reason, plasma is often treated as collisionless or collision-free. However, the discrete nature of the particles can be important, and often, the description of plasmas is incomplete without properly taking the discrete particle effects into account. The weak turbulence theory is a perturbative nonlinear theory, whose essential formalism was developed in the late 1950s and 1960s and continued on through the early 1980s. However, the standard material found in the literature does not treat the discrete particle effects and the associated fluctuations emitted spontaneously by thermal particles completely. Plasma particles emit electromagnetic fluctuations in all frequencies and wave vectors, but in the standard literature, the fluctuations are approximately treated by considering only those frequency-wave number regimes corresponding to the eigenmodes (or normal modes) satisfying the dispersion relations, while ignoring contributions from noneigenmodes. The present paper shows that the noneigenmode fluctuations modify the particle kinetic equation so that the generalized equation includes the Balescu-Lénard-Landau collision integral and also modify the wave kinetic equation to include not only the collisional damping term but also a term that depicts the bremsstrahlung emission of plasma normal modes.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: P.H.Y. acknowledges NSF grant AGS1550566 to the University of Maryland and the support by the BK21 plus program through the National Research Foundation (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education of Korea, to Kyung Hee University, Korea. He also acknowledges the Science Award Grant from the GFT Foundation to the University of Maryland. Part of this work was carried out while P.H.Y. was visiting the Ruhr University Bochum (RUB), Germany, which was made possible by support from the Ruhr University Research School PLUS, funded by Germany’s Excellence Initiative (DFG GSC 98/3), and the Visiting International Professor Fellowship administered by RUB. This work has been partially supported by the Brazilian agencies CNPq and FAPERGS. E.P.K. was supported via STFC consolidated grant. The work by R.S. was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through grant Schl 201/32-1.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Kontar, Professor Eduard
• Authors: Yoon, P.H., Ziebell, L.F., Kontar, E.P., and Schlickeiser, R.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Physics and Astronomy
• Journal Name: Physical Review E
• Publisher: American Physical Society
• ISSN: 1539-3755
• ISSN (Online): 1550-2376
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2016 American Physical Society
• First Published: First published in Physical Review E: 93(3): 033203
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the publisher copyright policy