STABILITY OF A SLIGHTLY INHOMOGENEOUS PLASMA

Journal Article · Wed Feb 01 04:00:00 EST 1961 · Physics of Fluids (U.S.)

OSTI ID:4093523

Krall, N A; Rosenbluth, M N

Slightly inhomogeneous plasmas were studied to determine their stability against growing longitudinal electrostatic oscillations. The procedure was to expand Maxwell's equations and the collisionless Boltzmann equation about epsilon = 0, corresponding to a uniform plasma, where the expansion parameter epsilon characterizes the particle density gradient. It was found that the shift in the eigenfrequency of the oscillation is of order epsilon /sup 2/; this shift is a real number to order epsilon /sup 2/ if the eigenfrequency for the corresponding uniform plasma, epsilon = 0. is a real number. Transverse modes were also examined for some special directions of propagation, with similar results. It was observed that this expansion procedure would not reproduce instabilities associated with particle drifts. (auth)

• Research Organization: General Atomic Div., General Dynamics Corp., San Diego, Calif.
• NSA Number: NSA-15-010226
• OSTI ID: 4093523
• Report Number(s): GA-1417; 0031-9171
• Journal Information: Physics of Fluids (U.S.) , Journal Name: Physics of Fluids (U.S.) Vol. Vol: 4; ISSN PFLDA
• Country of Publication: Country unknown/Code not available
• Language: English

Related Subjects

DENSITY
DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS
ELECTRODYNAMICS
ELECTROSTATICS
FREQUENCY
MAXWELL EQUATIONS
OSCILLATIONS
PHYSICS
PLASMA
STABILITY