Landau damping of electrostatic waves in arbitrarily degenerate quantum plasmas
Abstract
We carry out a systematic study of the dispersion relation for linear electrostatic waves in an arbitrarily degenerate quantum electron plasma. We solve for the complex frequency spectrum for arbitrary values of wavenumber k and level of degeneracy μ. Our finding is that for large k and high μ the real part of the frequency ωr grows linearly with k and scales with μ, only because of the scaling of the Fermi energy. In this regime, the relative Landau damping rate γ/ωr becomes independent of k and varies inversely with μ. Thus, damping is weak but finite at moderate levels of degeneracy for short wavelengths.
- Publication:
-
Physics of Plasmas
- Pub Date:
- March 2016
- DOI:
- 10.1063/1.4943870
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1506.05494
- Bibcode:
- 2016PhPl...23c0702R
- Keywords:
-
- Physics - Plasma Physics;
- Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
- E-Print:
- 5 pages, 2 figures, replaced with the final version accepted for publication in Physics of Plasmas Letters