Relaxed plasma equilibria and entropy-related plasma self-organization principles

Abstract

The concept of plasma relaxation as a constrained energy minimization is reviewed. Recent work by the authors on generalizing this approach to partially relaxed three-dimensional plasma systems in a way consistent with chaos theory is discussed, with a view to clarifying the thermodynamic aspects of the variational approach used. Other entropy-related approaches to finding long-time steady states of turbulent or chaotic plasma systems are also briefly reviewed.