Abstract
This chapter introduces the basic concepts of diffusion. It starts from simple spatial diffusion as in the Brownian motion. As we saw in the previous chapter, collisions of charged particles in a plasma are different: they preferentially lead to small-angle interactions, deflecting the particle only slightly from its original path. In a magnetized plasma, small-angle interactions can be described as scattering in pitch angle. Pitch-angle diffusion plays an important role in particle propagation in interplanetary space (cf. Sect. 9.2.2) and in the scattering of radiation belt particles into the loss cone. The basic scattering process, however, is different from the one sketched in Sect. 5.3.2: in the rarefied space plasmas, scattering does not result from Coulomb collisions between charged particles but from wave—particle interactions where energy is transferred from waves to particles and vice versa.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man: and are at their wit’s end.
Psalm 107, v. 27
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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Kallenrode, MB. (1998). Diffusive Transport. In: Space Physics. Advanced Texts in Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03653-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03653-2_6
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