Electron oscillations in a fully ionized plasma

The excitation of HF electron oscillations in a fully ionized collisional plasma in the presence of parallel external electric and magnetic fields is investigated. Ion motion is neglected, and it is assumed that the strength of the uniform external electric field is so small that the initial steady-state electron velocity distribution is temporally stable. An expression for the dielectric tensor of the collisional electron plasma is obtained on the basis of an exact analytical solution to the linearized kinetic Fokker-Planck equation. Collisional damping of electron Langmuir waves is analyzed for the case of an isotropic collisional plasma, and the results are compared with those of previous studies.