Individual Motion of a Charged Particle in Electric and Magnetic Fields

Abstract

This chapter deals with an idealized situation: the description of the behaviour of a single charged particle (assuming no interaction whatsoever with other particles) when subjected to electric or magnetic field alone or to some geometrical combination of these two kinds of fields. In the case of electric fields E, special attention will be paid to high-frequency (HF) electric field in preparation for the description of HF (including microwave) discharges in Chap. 4. The presence of a magnetic field B results in a cyclotron motion, encountered for example in electron cyclotron-resonance discharges (Chap. 4). The combination of E and B fields in different spatial configurations and then the inclusion of the spatial inhomogeneity of the B field reveals so-called drift velocities, some of them, for instance, being detrimental to the efficient operation of Tokomaks, nowadays investigated as possible controlled fusion reactors.