Cooling, collisions, and anisotropy: electron-positron plasmas and beyond

HEPP Colloquium

  • Date: Sep 18, 2020
  • Time: 09:00 AM - 09:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Daniel Kennedy
  • Location: Garching und Greifswald
  • Room: Zoom Meeting
  • Host: HEPP
  • Contact: hepp@ipp.mpg.de
The behaviour of a collisional plasma which is optically thin to cyclotron radiation is considered, and the distribution functions accessible to it on the various timescales in the system are calculated. Particular attention is paid to the limit in which the collision time exceeds the radiation emission time, making the electron distribution function strongly anisotropic. Unusually for plasma physics, the collision operator can nevertheless be calculated analytically although the plasma is far from Maxwellian. The rate of radiation emission is calculated and found to be governed by the collision frequency multiplied by a factor that only depends logarithmically on plasma parameters. Two broad classes of applications are also discussed.
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