Abstract
The word plasma is used to describe a wide variety of macroscopically neutral substances containing many interacting free electrons and ionized atoms or molecules, which exhibit collective behavior due to the long-range coulomb forces. Not all media containing charged particles, however, can be classified as plasmas. For a collection of interacting charged and neutral particles to exhibit plasma behavior it must satisfy certain conditions, or criteria, for plasma existence. These criteria will be discussed in some detail in the next section.
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© 2004 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Bittencourt, J.A. (2004). Introduction. In: Fundamentals of Plasma Physics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-4030-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-4030-1_1
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
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Online ISBN: 978-1-4757-4030-1
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