Wave Motion in a Plasma Based on a Fokker-Planck Equation

by Alan V. Oppenheim

Excerpt from Wave Motion in a Plasma Based on a Fokker-Planck Equation

We introduce an isotropic approximation to the fokker-planck collision operators in Boltzmann's equations in order to study small amplitude wave motion in a fully ionized, neutral, two component plasma in a steady, applied magnetic field. With this model we find Larmor resonance modes which can not be found from theories based on the relaxation model of Bhatnagar, Gross and Krook[1] (the Krook model). We remark that so far the Krook model is the only other collision model from which one computes Larmor resonances. Moreover, these modes persist in a certain non-uniform collisionless limit....

105 pages, Hardcover

Published August 24, 2018

About the author

Alan Victor Oppenheim is a professor of engineering at MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is also a principal investigator in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), at the Digital Signal Processing Group.

His research interests are in the general area of signal processing and its applications. He is co-author of the widely used textbooks Discrete-Time Signal Processing and Signals and Systems. He is also the editor of several advanced books on signal processing.