Abstract
As we have seen, relativistic plasmas are relevant to both fusion energy research and high energy astrophysics. Coulomb collisions influence behaviour in many of these systems, such as transport in inertial fusion targets [1], the slowing of fast electrons formed in high intensity laser-plasma interactions [2] (critical to the fast ignition fusion scheme [3]), current drive [4, 5] and electron runaway [6, 7] in tokamaks, the thermalisation of astrophysical plasmas [8, 9] and, potentially, gamma-ray burst emission [10].
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.
Note that the Landau collision kernel is semi-relativistic, in that it is valid provided that \(|\mathbf {v}\cdot \mathbf {v}^\prime |\ll c^2\), whereas Rosenbluth and Trubnikov’s differentials formulations are strictly non-relativistic, requiring \(|\mathbf {v} |^2 \ll c^2\) and, separately, \(|\mathbf {v}^\prime |^2 \ll c^2\).
- 2.
As an aside, we note that Shkarofsky has rewritten the force of dynamical friction and diffusion tensor in terms of three potentials [26], which are linear combinations of the five potentials given here.
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Pike, O.J. (2017). Dynamical Friction in a Relativistic Plasma. In: Particle Interactions in High-Temperature Plasmas. Springer Theses. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63447-0_3
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