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Theoretical Background

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Particle Interactions in High-Temperature Plasmas

Part of the book series: Springer Theses ((Springer Theses))

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Abstract

Chapter 1 discussed how high temperature plasmas may be formed in the laboratory in ICF and high intensity laser-plasma experiments. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the various theoretical descriptions of these systems.

This chapter is an enhanced version of a chapter from an original PhD thesis which is available Open Access from the repository https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/ of Imperial College London. The original chapter was distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits any non-commercial use, duplication, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this book or parts of it. The Creative Commons license does not apply to this enhanced chapter, but only to the original chapter of the thesis.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For example, in a NIF hohlraum, ionised gas densities (\(10^{27}\) m\(^{-3}\)) are produced over of order \(10^{-7}\) m\(^3\) [1].

  2. 2.

    This interpretation relies on the fact that an individual charge is screened at distances of order \(\lambda _D\) due to Debye shielding, which takes of order \(1/\omega _p\) to be established [7]; we assume this to be the case.

  3. 3.

    Collisionless processes are ignored throughout this work.

  4. 4.

    Akama separately obtained this expression using a quantum electrodynamical treatment [12].

  5. 5.

    In fact, as we will see in Chap. 6, it is bremsstrahlung that is the dominant energy loss mechanism for an electron at very high energies.

  6. 6.

    The multi-photon Breit-Wheeler process has been referred to simply as the Breit-Wheeler process by various authors [51,52,53,54]. In this work, the Breit-Wheeler process or Breit-Wheeler pair production always refer to the two-photon process.

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  1. Blackett Laboratory, Department of Physics, Imperial College London, London, UK

    Oliver James Pike

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Pike, O.J. (2017). Theoretical Background. In: Particle Interactions in High-Temperature Plasmas. Springer Theses. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63447-0_2

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