COLLISION-INDUCED INSTABILITY IN A PLASMA WITH AN ISOTROPIC VELOCITY-SPACE DISTRIBUTION

Technical Report · Tue Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 1963

OSTI ID:4687146

Drummond, J E; Nelson, D J; Hirshfield, J L

A dispersion law for the propagation of longitudinal and transverse waves in an electron plasma is derived using the Boltzmann equation with a collision term representative of isotropic, recoilless, electic, binaty scattering of the electrons. For a spatially homogeneous plasma, the unperturbed velocity-space distribution is thus isotropic. Taking a collision frequency, nu , which varies wit speed v as nu (v) = const. v/sup h/, a class of collision- induce instabilities cand arise if --3> h> +3. The growth rate of these instabilities is largest for an infinite wavelength perturbation. The results for trandsverse waves agree with an earlier derivation that used the relaxation approximation to describe the collisions. (auth)

• Research Organization: Boeing Scientific Research Labs., Seattle; Yale Univ., New Haven
• NSA Number: NSA-17-042046
• OSTI ID: 4687146
• Report Number(s): D1-82-0273
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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