Effect of bremsstrahlung radiation emission on fast electrons in plasmas

Abstract

Bremsstrahlung radiation emission is an important energy loss mechanism for energetic electrons in plasmas. In this paper we investigate the effect of spontaneous bremsstrahlung emission on the momentum-space structure of the electron distribution, fully accounting for the emission of finite-energy photons by modeling the bremsstrahlung interactions with a Boltzmann collision operator. We find that electrons accelerated by electric fields can reach significantly higher energies than predicted by the commonly used radiative stopping-power model. Furthermore, we show that the emission of soft photons can contribute significantly to the dynamics of electrons with an anisotropic distribution by causing pitch-angle scattering at a rate that increases with energy.