Coulomb collision effects on linear Landau damping

Abstract

Coulomb collisions at rate ν produce slightly probabilistic rather than fully deterministic charged particle trajectories in weakly collisional plasmas. Their diffusive velocity scattering effects on the response to a wave yield an effective collision rate νeff ≫ ν and a narrow dissipative boundary layer for particles with velocities near the wave phase velocity. These dissipative effects produce temporal irreversibility for times t 1/νeff during Landau damping of a small amplitude Langmuir wave. © 2014 Author(s).