Landau damping of electrostatic waves in arbitrarily degenerate quantum plasmas | CU Experts

Overview

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.