Dynamic and Debye shielding and anti-shielding
- Physics Department, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720-7300 (United States)
While shielding in {ital collisional} plasmas obeys the standard Debye result, shielding in {ital collisionless} plasmas is far more complex than commonly believed. For example, a one-dimensional (highly magnetized), immobile-ion plasma can, in some circumstances, {ital anti}-{ital shield} a positive test charge; i.e. the plasma becomes more {ital positive} in the vicinity of the test charge. When shielding does occur, it results from electrons dynamically trapped in the neighborhood of the test charge. A new theory of collisionless (Dynamic) shielding in one, two and three dimensions is presented here, and is in excellent agreement with experiments in pure electron plasmas. Because the distribution functions found in Dynamic shielding are highly non-Maxwellian in the non-linear regime, collisionless Dynamic shielding can be substantially less efficacious than collisional Debye shielding. {copyright} {ital 1996 American Institute of Physics.}
- OSTI ID:
- 282896
- Journal Information:
- Physics of Plasmas, Vol. 3, Issue 5; Other Information: PBD: May 1996
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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