Plasma Oscillations and Landau Damping

Journal Article · Tue Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 1963 · Physics of Fluids (New York)

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1706871· OSTI ID:4666721

Weitzner, Harold

The problem of the plane wave oscillation of a onedimensional plasma is considered. It is shown that for stable plasmas with unperturbed distribution functions in a general class that includes Maxwellians as a special case, the electric field does not damp exponentially fast, as predicted by Landau. Instead, the electric field tends to zero as some reciprocal power of time, where the exact power depends on the smoothness of the initial data. To obtain a more conventional result it is assumed that all distribution functions vanish for particle speed greater than some constant, as they must relativistically. Then for wavenumber less than a certain constant the plasma oscillations do have an undamped part corresponding to a conventional normal mode with a phase speed greater than the fastest particle speed. For wavenumbers larger than that constant the oscillations tend to zero as some reciprocal power of time.

• Research Organization: New York Univ., New York
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• NSA Number: NSA-17-033171
• OSTI ID: 4666721
• Journal Information: Physics of Fluids (New York), Journal Name: Physics of Fluids (New York) Journal Issue: 8 Vol. 6; ISSN 0031-9171; ISSN PFLDAS
• Publisher: American Institute of Physics
• Country of Publication: Country unknown/Code not available
• Language: English

Related Subjects

CHARGED PARTICLES
DISTRIBUTION
ELECTRIC FIELDS
ELECTRONS
FREQUENCY
LANDAU DAMPING
MAXWELL DISTRIBUTION
NUMERICALS
OSCILLATIONS
PHYSICS
PLASMA
PLASMA WAVES
STABILITY
VELOCITY